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This longitudinal study investigated the effect of experience with tactile stimulation on infants' ability to reach to targets on the body, an important adaptive skill. Infants were provided weekly tactile stimulation on eight body locations from 4 to 8 months of age (N = 11), comparing their ability to reach to the body to infants in a control group who did not receive stimulation (N = 10). Infants who received stimulation were more likely to successfully reach targets on the body than controls by 7 months of age. These findings indicate that tactile stimulation facilitates the development of reaching to the body by allowing infants to explore the sensorimotor correlations emerging from the stimulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sensorimotor theory of perceptual consciousness offers a form of enactivism in that it stresses patterns of interaction instead of any alleged internal representations of the environment. But how does it relate to forms of enactivism stressing the continuity between life and mind (and more particularly autopoiesis, autonomy, and valence)? We shall distinguish sensorimotor enactivism, which stresses perceptual capacities themselves, from autopoietic enactivism, which claims an essential connection between experience and autopoietic processes or associated background capacities. We show how autopoiesis, autonomous agency, and affective dimensions of experience may fit into sensorimotor enactivism, and we identify differences between this interpretation and autopoietic enactivism. By taking artificial consciousness as a case in point, we further sharpen the distinction between sensorimotor enactivism and autopoietic enactivism. We argue that sensorimotor enactivism forms a strong default position for an enactive account of perceptual consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we present a simple agent which learns an internal representation of space without a priori knowledge of its environment, body, or sensors. The learned environment is seen as an internal space representation. This representation is isomorphic to the group of transformations applied to the environment. The model solves certain theoretical and practical issues encountered in previous work in sensorimotor contingency theory. Considering the mathematical description of the internal representation, analysis of its properties and simulations, we prove that this internal representation is equivalent to knowledge of space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of understanding how physical processes in the brain could give rise to consciousness has been identified with the 'comparative explanatory gap ', the problem of explaining why different experiences have the differing qualities they do, and the 'absolute explanatory gap ', the problem of explaining why anything can be conscious at all. The main innovation of the sensorimotor theory is that it provides a very appealing way of closing the comparative gap by postulating that the quality of experiences corresponds to objective sensorimotor laws that characterize one's bodily interaction with the environment. Here I expound in greater detail how the approach deals with the absolute gap. I refine my previous efforts at understanding what we mean by 'being conscious of something ' by abandoning my previous hierarchical approach; by introducing the concept of 'mental manipulation and by relying more on a notion of self than I have done previously. I end up with a more variegated notion of consciousness than in previous work, that includes the idea of a complex interwoven patchwork of consciousness with no simple conscious/nonconscious distinction across different species or agents. The approach suggests we need to review the links between consciousness and ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design of robotic systems is largely dictated by our purely human intuition about how we perceive the world. This intuition has been proven incorrect with regard to a number of critical issues, such as visual change blindness. In order to develop truly autonomous robots, we must step away from this intuition and let robotic agents develop their own way of perceiving. The robot should start from scratch and gradually develop perceptual notions, under no prior assumptions, exclusively by looking into its sensorimotor experience and identifying repetitive patterns and invariants. One of the most fundamental perceptual notions, space, cannot be an exception to this requirement. In this paper we look into the prerequisites for the emergence of simplified spatial notions on the basis of a robot’s sensorimotor flow. We show that the notion of space as environment-independent cannot be deduced solely from exteroceptive information, which is highly variable and is mainly determined by the contents of the environment. The environment-independent definition of space can be approached by looking into the functions that link the motor commands to changes in exteroceptive inputs. In a sufficiently rich environment, the kernels of these functions correspond uniquely to the spatial configuration of the agent’s exteroceptors. We simulate a redundant robotic arm with a retina installed at its end-point and show how this agent can learn the configuration space of its retina. The resulting manifold has the topology of the Cartesian product of a plane and a circle, and corresponds to the planar position and orientation of the retina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proposes a framework for thinking about the nature of vision and visual consciousness called sensorimotor contingency theory. Details on the structure of vision; Refinements of the view; Information on empirical results based which are related to the theory of visual experience; Description on remote tactile sensing; Conclusion.

Abstract: During the “rubber hand illusion” (RHI) participants feel touch originating from an artificial hand, which is felt to belong to the own body. The perceived location of the real hand is shifted towards the location of the artificial hand. However, evidence as to whether the RHI is accompanied by alterations of hand action is mixed. We found that the perceived size of one''s own hand was affected by the size of the artificial hand that was used to elicit the illusion. Moreover, we tested a possible transfer of the RHI to a reach-to-grasp action. We observed that hand transport (i.e., reach) errors after RHI induction were independent of artificial hand size, showing that the parameter which is important for these reaching errors is the hand''s perceived location. Results thus show that the RHI affects not only perceptual, but also action processing. In contrast, grip aperture was affected by artificial hand size independent of the RHI, suggesting that visual information about hand size affects grasping independent of embodiment of the artificial hand. Grip size increased with artificial hand size; this effect is explained by a higher reliance on proprioceptive information during blind reaching after receiving distorted visual information. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]