socSMCs: Socializing Sensorimotor Contingencies

Time Scales of Sensorimotor Contingencies

In Sensorimotor Contingency Theory (SMCT) differences between the perceptual qualities of sensory modalities are explained by the different structure of dependencies between a human’s actions and the ensuing changes in sensory stimulation. It distinguishes modalityrelated Sensory-Motor Contingencies (SMCs), that describe the structure of changes for individual sensory modalities, and object-rel...

Extending Sensorimotor Contingencies to Cognition

A Dynamical Systems Account of Sensorimotor Contingencies

According to the sensorimotor approach, perception is a form of embodied know-how, constituted by lawful regularities in the sensorimotor flow or in sensorimotor contingencies (SMCs) in an active and situated agent. Despite the attention that this approach has attracted, there have been few attempts to define its core concepts formally. In this paper, we examine the idea of SMCs and argue that ...

Sensorimotor Contingencies, Event Codes, and Perceptual Symbols

Cognitivism, the traditional approach to understanding cognition, has argued for the essential role of symbolic computations over internal mental representations. But this view has been criticized on a number of grounds, one in particular being the assumption of amodality: that the symbols involved in processing are arbitrarily related to their referents. An opposing view—the framework of Perce...

Guest Editorial Sensorimotor Contingencies for Cognitive Robotics

The sensorimotor approach to cognition states, that the key to bring semantics to the world of a robot, requires making the robot learn the relation between the actions that the robot performs and the change it experiences in its sensed data because of those actions. Those relations are called sensorimotor contingencies. This special issue presents a variety of recent developments in sensorimot...