John Kevin O’Regan
Andrea Eugenio Cavanna, Andrea Nani
Consciousness 2014 DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-44088-9_26 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Conscious experience Phenomenal quality Brain process Phenomenal consciousness Change blindness |
| Key points | The text credits O'Regan with co-discovering change blindness, the failure to notice major changes in a scene when presentation is interrupted, and with helping develop the "sensorimotor approach," which holds that sensation and consciousness involve interaction with the body and environment. It reports that he has addressed phenomenal consciousness theoretically and experimentally, including pain and sensory substitution. |
Abstract
John Kevin O’Regan (born on 24 May 1948) is an American neuroscientist who has lived and worked in Paris since 1971. He studied theoretical physics at Sussex and Cambridge Universities and in 1975 gained a PhD from Cambridge University for his research on eye movements during reading tasks. His interest in the study of the perceived stability in the visual process has led him to the discoveries of an optimal viewing position for the eye to fixate in words and the phenomenon of change blindness . In change blindness – codiscovered with collaborators Ron Rensink and Jim Clark – a person looking at a picture is not able to see major changes that occur in a given scene when it is presented again with changes accompanied by a brief interruption like a cinema cut, a blank, or even small distractors like mudsplashes on a car windscreen. Kevin O’Regan has significantly contributed to develop the so-called sensorimotor approach to sensation and consciousness, according to which both sensation and consciousness involve an interaction with the body and the environment. In particular, O’Regan has addressed the problem of the nature of phenomenal consciousness – the what it is like of being in a certain sensation rather than another (see Chaps. 1 and 11 ) – both theoretically in relation to space and color perception and experimentally in relation to pain and sensory substitution (i.e., the possibility of using one sensory modality, e.g., hearing, to replace another, e.g., vision). O’Regan is also interested in applying his work to robotics. He is the current Director of the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, CNRS, Université Paris Descartes.