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G. Riva, M.T. Anguera, B.K. Wiederhold and F. Mantovani (Eds.)
From Communication to Presence: Cognition, Emotions and Culture towards the
Ultimate Communicative Experience. Festschrift in honor of Luigi Anolli
IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2006, (c) All rights reserved - http://www.emergingcommunication.com
“This singular ‘embodiment constraint’ closely locates all our sensors and effectors
in a very small region of physical space, simultaneously establishing dense causal
coupling... The persistent functional link just mentioned has many theoretically
relevant aspects. One of them is that it firmly ties all activities of the organism (be
cognitive, attentional, or behavioral) into an internal context.” (p. 161).
Recent studies suggest that proprioceptive awareness is the very first kind of
consciousness to emerge in the nervous system [32, 33]: it exists prenatally and is
sufficiently developed at birth for neonate imitation [34]. As underlined by Gallagher
[26]:
“Conscious experience is normally of an intermodally seamless spatial system. One
of the important functions of the body in the context of perception and action is to
provide the basis for an egocentric [body-centered] spatial frame of reference.
Indeed, this egocentric framework is required for the very possibility of action, and
for the general structure of perceptual experience. The fact that perception and
action are perspectivally spatial (for example, the book appears to my right or to my
left, or in the center of my perceptual field), is a fact that depends precisely on the
spatiality of the perceiving and acting body.” (p. 59).
Supporting this position, Revonsuo suggests [30]:
“Each distinct phenomenal coordinate system defines a different subject: the global
bundles of phenomenal features synchronously present within each coordinate
system are the momentary phenomenal contents of one subject. Empirically based
phenomenology should be built on a model that takes the spatiality and centeredness
of consciousness as its fundamental structural and organizational property. The
phenomenal level is based on an egocentric, bounded coordinate system whose
regions can instantiate qualitative features. ” (pp. 178-179).
It is important to underline that - as predicted by Heidegger - the phenomenal space
is different from the “real” and “physical” space that surrounds us: phenomenal
spatiality is directly present in experience whereas the “physical” space is an
abstraction, not experienced directly.
3.3.2 Action in perception
An emerging trend within embodied cognition is the analysis of the link between
action and perception. According to it, action and perception are more closely linked
than has traditionally been assumed. This view is strongly influenced by (and in
many respects, very similar to) a number of earlier proposals. Both Husserl,
Merleau-Ponty, and Poincaré suggested that spatial content may be acquired from
knowledge of possible movements. In psychology of perception, the ecological
approach presented by Gibson [35, 36] shares many similarities to this vision.
Gibson introduced a shift of focus in perception: from how the visual system
actually detect the forms, to the invariants - optical flow, texture gradient, and
affordances - that visual systems detect in the dynamic optical array.
This approach underlines that perception requires an active organism. On one side,
the act of perception depends upon an interaction between the organism and the