Where Is the Action in Perception? An Exploratory Study With a Haptic Sensory Substitution Device.
Frontiers in Psychology January 1, 2020 Tom Froese, Guillermo U Ortiz-Garin
Enactive cognitive science and ecological psychology both hold that active movement is important for perception, but disagree on whether agency plays an instrumental or a constitutive role. The authors propose a novel double-participant experimental setup to isolate agency as the key variable distinguishing active from passive bodily movement. They pilot this setup with a psychological study of width discrimination using the Enactive Torch, a haptic sensory substitution device. The results showed no evidence favoring constitutive agency over instrumental agency. However, debriefing revealed that several participants used cognitive strategies not relying on spatial perception. The approach is a viable direction for future research, but greater care is needed to establish the desired first-person experience.