Lecture 3 Cognizing Space 1: Nonconceptual content and the impression of space 1Introduction: Where we stand 2The problem of the nonconceptual experience of space 3The role of conscious experience in the study of perception 3.1 The experience of perceived space 4Nonconceptual content and the experience of space 4.1What is the problem of spatial representation? 4.2The experience of space 5The genesis of our Sense of Space: 5.1Internalizing by incorporating visuomotor experience: Poincaré’s insights 5.2Do we pick out spatial locations in a unitary frame of reference? The coordinate transformation function and as-needed translation Do we encode the location of empty places?

Plans for the Ames distorting room

The Ames distorting room

Question: Is “how things look” ever cognitively penetrable? If you don’t “see” your wife/husband as changing size when walking across the Ames room, while strangers do change size, what does that tell you about the experience of seeing? If you “see” nonexistent things under hypnotic suggestion, what does that tell you about the experience of seeing?

If your experience of seeing the world is panoramic and finely detailed what does that tell you about the content of your experience in relation to what goes on in visual perception?

Is the panoramic experience a result of a nonconceptual representation? And if so, is the content of that representation available in principle for conceptualization?

What is the problem of spatial representation? We are so familiar with space and also with certain ways of thinking about it (inherited from Euclid and from Déscartes) that formulating the problem is a large part of the problem itself  We find it natural to think in terms of points and lines, but we do not ever actually see points or lines  Jean Nicod explored other primitives with which to build a Euclidean geometry that would be more compatible with the type of data we actually sense  An important (and essentially modern) way of posing the problem was provided for us by Henri Poincaré and I will spend some time discussing his view of 3D space

The genesis of our ‘sense of space’ Poincaré’s insight: The 3D space that we sense is intimately tied to our ability to act toward things located in it (including navigating through it)  This includes our multimodal perceptions of objects and of our own bodies  It assumes we can distinguish between sensing locations and sensing other qualities, and between independent movements of objects and movements that we produce The problem of frames of reference. In our causal connection with space do we pick out spatial locations in a unitary frame of reference?  The case for massively-multiple frames of reference  The case for as-needed coordinate transformations of locations of sensory objects (instead of location encoding in a uniform frame of reference)

Sense of space This notion will play an important role in the last lecture so it is important to distinguish sense of space from an internal space of any kind A sense of space is what enables us to orient to perceived things, even when we are not conscious of what the things are – e.g., they may be proprioceptively sensed ‘things’ What we orient to is what we index (I have referred to nonvisual indexes as Anchors)  Note: We never know what we are indexing since indexing is nonconceptual!