Peter König: On the relation of action and perception

Neuroaesthetics | Symposium


Symposium im ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie,
22.-24. November 2012
In Kooperation und mit Unterstützung der Gemeinnützigen
Hertie-Stiftung.


Rising interest in theories of embodiment highlight the need to
better understand the relation of action and conscious
perception.
Specifically, we investigate the concept that the quality of
sensory awareness is determined by systematic change of afferent
signals resulting from behaviour and knowledge thereof.
The feelSpace belt provides qualitatively new sensory signals,
relating
the orientation of the subject to magnetic north. The resulting
transformation laws, linking change of sensory signals and
actions by the subject, establish sensorimotor
contingencies.
The study demonstrates that the signals provided by the feelSpace
belt improve behavioural performance, influence physiologic
reactions and lead to qualitative changes in perceptual
effects.
These results provide evidence for a causal role of sensorimotor
contingencies in perceptual awareness. In a follow-up we study
sensory enhancement in a congenitally blind subject.
Consistent with an earlier report improved behavioural
performance and perceptual effects could be induced. However,
unsupervised training by itself was not sufficient, and explicit
instructions and training was necessary to ground the
qualitatively new signals and provide associations with the
available senses.
A unified framework is presented that describes the interaction
of sensory and motor systems as an interaction optimizing the
predictability of sensory representations in the light of the
behavioural repertoire.
In summary, the presented experiments argue for a constitutive
role of action in the formation of perception, although in some
aspects it was dependent on available cognitive resources.

Dr. Peter König is Professor of Neurobiopsychology at the
University of Os-
nabrück and director of the Institute of Cognitive Science. He
studied physics and medicine at the University of Bonn. From 1978
to 1994 he was scholarship holder and research assistant at the
Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt am Main in
the department of neurophysiology, and from 1995 to 1997 Senior
Fellow at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla,
California.
This was followed by his Habilitation thesis at the Goethe
University Frankfurt and the conferring of the title of private
lecturer. From 1997 to 2003 he worked at the Institute of
Neuroinformatics at the ETH Zurich as assistant professor. In
2009, he founded WhiteMatter Labs GmbH of which he is the
scientific director. Since 2001, he is visiting professor at the
Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology of the
University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf.