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 Perceptual Symbol Systems—holds that the elements of thought should be treated not as amodal symbols, but rather as modality specific, analog representations that simulate particular aspects of perceptual experience. Though this approach has been gaining in popularity from intuitively appealing theoretical accounts, and suggestive empirical support, it has suffered from a lack of specificity for key constructs. To address this problem, this paper presents a more detailed study of the foundational concept of perceptual symbol. The proposal builds from recent work on the skill-based nature of visual perception (the Sensorimotor Contingency Theory), and research that provides tools for representing the inseparable link between perception and action (the Theory of Event Coding). From these two sources, the characterization of a perceptual symbol as a selective re-enactment of perceptual experience, treated as a unit, will be elaborated and defended.