Action-based Theories of Perception

Action is a means of acquiring perceptual information about the environment. Turning around, for example, alters your spatial relations to surrounding objects and, hence, which of their properties you visually perceive. Moving your hand over an object’s surface enables you to feel its shape, temperature, and texture. Sniffing and walking around a room enables you to track down the source of an unpleasant smell. Active or passive movements of the body can also generate useful sources of perceptual information (Gibson 1966, 1979). The pattern of optic flow in the retinal image produced by forward locomotion, for example, contains information about the direction in which you are heading, while motion parallax is a “cue” used by the visual system to estimate the relative distances of objects in your field of view. In these uncontroversial ways and others, perception is instrumentally dependent on action. According to an explanatory framework that Susan Hurley (1998) dubs the “Input-Output Picture”, the dependence of perception on action is purely instrumental:

Movement can alter sensory inputs and so result in different perceptions… changes in output are merely a means to changes in input, on which perception depends directly. (1998: 342)

The different action-based theories of perception, reviewed in this entry, challenge the Input-Output Picture. They maintain that perception can also depend in a noninstrumental or constitutive way on action (or, more generally, on capacities for object-directed motor control). This position has taken many different forms in the history of philosophy and psychology

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/action-perception/

AI says

Action-based theories of perception hold that perception is not a passive reception of sensory data but is constituted by an organism’s active engagement with the world. What and how we perceive depends on what we can do, on our capacities for action, and on our mastery of sensorimotor relations.

The core claim is that perceptual experience is grounded in sensorimotor contingencies: lawful relations between movement and changes in sensory input. Seeing a cup is not primarily having an internal image of it, but knowing—practically and implicitly—how visual input would change if you moved your eyes, head, or body, or if you grasped the cup. Perception is therefore skill-like rather than representational in the traditional sense.

This view contrasts with classical representational theories, which treat perception as the construction of an internal model of the world from sensory stimuli. Action-based theories argue that such internal models are not fundamental; perception emerges from real-time interaction between organism and environment.

Key figures include J.J. Gibson, whose ecological approach emphasized affordances—action possibilities offered by the environment relative to an organism—and Alva Noë, who explicitly formulated the sensorimotor account of perception. In Noë’s view, perception is something we do, not something that happens in us.

A major implication is that perception is world-involving and embodied. It cannot be fully explained by neural activity alone, because it depends on bodily skills and environmental structure. This also explains why perception degrades when action possibilities are restricted, as in certain neurological or experimental conditions.

Common criticisms target whether action-based theories can fully account for perceptual phenomenology, hallucinations, or perception without overt movement. Defenders typically respond that actual movement is not required—only the possession of sensorimotor knowledge shaped by past interaction.

Wikipedia

Action-specific perception, or perception-action, is a psychological theory that people perceive their environment and events within it in terms of their ability to act. This theory hence suggests a person’s capability to carry out a particular task affects how they perceive the different aspects and methods involved in that task. For example, softball players who are hitting better see the ball as bigger. Tennis players see the ball as moving slower when they successfully return the ball. In the field of human-computer interaction, alterations in accuracy impact both the perception of size and time, while adjustments in movement speed impact the perception of distance. Furthermore, the perceiver’s intention to act is also critical; while the perceiver’s ability to perform the intended action influences perception, the perceiver’s abilities for unintended actions have little or no effect on perception. Finally, the objective difficulty of the task appears to modulate size, distance, and time perception.

Read the rest at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action-specific_perception