Sensorimotor enactivism and temporal experience

Perceptual experience depends not just on internal brain representations but on active bodily exploration of the environment, according to the sensorimotor approach. A challenge to this view is explaining how we experience temporal duration, since event-like properties cannot be captured by reference to sensory changes from possible movements. This paper argues that emphasizing the temporally extended, interactive nature of perception—more than the original account does—can meet this challenge. It further contends that an extensionalist account of temporal experience, which treats duration as directly perceived, can help make sense of object experience as inherently temporal.

Study at a glance

Abstract

O’Regan and Noë’s sensorimotor approach rejects the old-fashioned view that perceptual experience in humans depends solely on the activation of internal representations. Reflecting a wealth of empirical work, for example active vision, the approach suggests that perceiving is, instead, a matter of bodily exploration of the outside environment. To this end, the approach says the perceiver must deploy knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies, the ways sense input changes with movement by the perceiver or object perceived. Clark has observed that the approach faces a challenge accounting for the experience of temporal duration, since event-like properties cannot be characterised by reference to the sensory consequences of possible movements. This paper argues that the account can best be shored up by emphasising, more than Noë does, the dependence of perceptual experience, in general, on temporally extended, organismic interaction with the outside environment. The paper argues, moreover, that an ‘extensionalist’ account of temporal experience could help make sense of object experience, which is itself, plausibly, an experience of temporal duration.