A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness

J. Kevin O'Regan & Alva Noë

Table of Contents

1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 The puzzle of visual experience
1.2 What are sensory modalities?
1.3 An alternative approach: the sensorimotor contingency theory

2.1 Sensorimotor contingencies induced by the visual apparatus
2.2 Sensorimotor contingencies determined by visual attributes
2.3 Sensation and perception
2.4 Perceivers must have mastery of patterns of sensorimotor contingency
2.5 Important upshot: A sensory modality is a mode of exploration mediated by distinctive sensorimotor contingencies
2.6 Visual awareness: Integrating sensorimotor contingencies with reasoning and action-guidance
2.7 Visual consciousness and experience: forms of awareness

3.1 Knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies is a practical, not a propositional form of knowledge
3.2 Mastery must be currently exercised
3.3 Historical note: relation to other similar ideas

4.1 The world as an outside memory
4.2 The impression of seeing everything
4.3 Vividness through transients
4.4 Dreaming and mental imagery
4.5 Seeing without eye movements
4.6 Why we don't see behind ourselves, but we do see partially occluded objects

5.1  Introduction
5.2 The extraretinal signal
5.3 Trans-saccadic fusion
5.4 Saccadic suppression
5.5 Filling in the blind spot and perceptual completion
5.6 Other retinal non-homogeneities and the perception of color
5.7 "Red" is knowing the structure of the changes that "red" causes
5.8 Eye-position contingent perception
5.9 Inversion of the visual world
5.10 Change blindness experiments
5.11 Inattentional amnesia
5.12 Informal examples
5.13 Remote tactile sensing
5.14 Tactile visual sensory substitution
5.15 The "facial vision" of the blind

6.1 Introduction
6.2 Two kinds of visual consciousness
6.3 The problem of qualia
6.4 What gives rise to the illusion of qualia?
6.5 Is the illusion of qualia really so widespread?
6.6 The ineffability of the qualitative character of experience
6.7 On the possibility of phenomenology
6.8 Overcoming the explanatory gap (or Why there is no gap)
6.9 Summary

7.1 Awareness versus consciousness
7.2 Blindsight
7.3 Our relationship to Dennett

8.1 The brain and vision
8.2 The search for neural representations and the neural correlate of consciousness
8.3 There is no need for "binding"
8.4 A new way of thinking about the role of the brain in vision: a program for future research
8.5 Toward a sensorimotor approach to visual neuroscience

REFERENCES

FOOTNOTES