Embodied gestalts: Unstable visual phenomena become stable when they are stimuli for competitive action selection
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TIME FOR ACTION: REACHING FOR A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF THE DYNAMICS OF COGNITION
Embodied gestalts: Unstable visual phenomena become stable when they are stimuli for competitive action selection Dobromir G. Dotov 1
&
Michael T. Turvey 2 & Till D. Frank 2
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2019
Abstract An animal’s environment is rich with affordances. Different possible actions are specified by visual information while competing for dominance over neural dynamics. Affordance competition models account for this in terms of winner-takes-all crossinhibition dynamics. Multistable phenomena also reveal how the visual system deals with ambiguity. Their key property is spontaneous instability, in forms such as alternating dominance in binocular rivalry. Theoretical models of self-inhibition or selforganized instability posit that the instability is tied to some kind of neural adaptation and that its functional significance is to enable flexible perceptual transitions. We hypothesized that the two perspectives are interlinked. Spontaneous instability is an intrinsic property of perceptual systems, but it is revealed when they are stripped from the constraints of possibilities for action. To test this, we compared a multistable gestalt phenomenon against its embodied version and estimated the neural adaptation and competition parameters of an affordance transition dynamic model. Wertheimer’s (Zeitschrift fur Psychologie 61, 161–265, 1912) optimal (β) and pure (φ) forms of apparent motion from a stroboscopic point-light display were endowed with action relevance by embedding the display in a visual object-tracking task. Thus, each mode was complemented by its action, because each perceptual mode uniquely enabled different ways of tracking the target. Perceptual judgment of the traditional apparent motion exhibited spontaneous instabilities, in the form of earlier switching when the frame rate was changed stepwise. In contrast, the embodied version exhibited hysteresis, consistent with affordance transition studies. Consistent with our predictions, the parameter for competition between modes in the affordance transition model increased, and the parameter for self-inhibition vanished. Keywords Action selection . Affordances . Multistable phenomena . Perceptual rivalry . Perceptual instabilities . Transient neural dynamics
* Dobromir G. Dotov [email protected] 1
LIVELab, Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour and RHPCS, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
2
University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA
Atten Percept Psychophys
In a natural environment a functionally adaptive perceptual system has to guide behavior with respect to multiple and competing opportunities for action (Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014; Saltzman & Caplan, 2015). William James (1904) defined this as the problem of the multiplicity of potential structure.1 James Gibson (1966) later extended this to the problem of how the same optic array from the same environment can specify multiple and sometimes mutually exclusive possibilities
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