Membership categorisation, category-relevant spaces, and perception-in-action: the case of disputes between cyclists and drivers

This article is concerned with disputes between cyclists and drivers. The analysis describes members' categorisational practices that provide for the seeing of an ‘incorrect’ use of the road and for the production and relevancy of the context of the disputes (the traffic system). The analysis describes members' in situ and in vivo accomplishments of (spatial) rights and obligations in and through relational categorisations of road users and objects, their actions, and visually available resources, in relation to the ‘proper use of the road’ and the gestalt contexture of the common place traffic scene. The article revisits the suggestion of Hester and Francis that the organisation of categorisations in talk may provide technical access to the ways in which members organize the visual perception of the commonplace scene. The article closes by proposing a revised “observers' maxim” that takes in to account the highly indexical nature of observation and categorisation in and as the context in which observations are made

From sensorimotor dependencies to perceptual practices: making enactivism social

Proponents of enactivism should be interested in exploring what notion of action best captures the type of action-perception link that the view proposes, such that it covers all the aspects in which our doings constitute and are constituted by our perceiving. This article proposes and defends the thesis that the notion of sensorimotor dependencies is insufficient to account for the reality of human perception, and that the central enactive notion should be that of perceptual practices. Sensorimotor enactivism is insufficient because it has no traction on socially dependent perceptions, which are essential to the role and significance of perception in our lives. Since the social dimension is a central desideratum in a theory of human perception, enactivism needs a notion that accounts for such an aspect. This article sketches the main features of the Wittgenstein-inspired notion of perceptual practices as the central notion to understand perception. Perception, I claim, is properly understood as woven into a type of social practices that includes food, dance, dress, music, etc. More specifically, perceptual practices are the enactment of culturally structured, normatively rich techniques of commerce of meaningful multi- and inter-modal perceptible material. I argue that perceptual practices explain three central features of socially dependent perception: attentional focus, aspects’ saliency, and modal-specific harmony-like relations

Egocentric Spatial Representation in Action and Perception

Neuropsychological findings used to motivate the “two visual systems” hypothesis have been taken to endanger a pair of widely accepted claims about spatial representation in visual experience. The first is the claim that visual experience represents 3-D space around the perceiver using an egocentric frame of reference. The second is the claim that there is a constitutive link between the spatial contents of visual experience and the perceiver’s bodily actions. In this paper, I carefully assess three main sources of evidence for the two visual systems hypothesis and argue that the best interpretation of the evidence is in fact consistent with both claims. I conclude with some brief remarks on the relation between visual consciousness and rational agency

Perceiving pictures

I aim to give a new account of picture perception: of the way our visual system functions when we see something in a picture. My argument relies on the functional distinction between the ventral and dorsal visual subsystems. I propose that it is constitutive of picture perception that our ventral subsystem attributes properties to the depicted scene, whereas our dorsal subsystem attributes properties to the picture surface. This duality elucidates Richard Wollheim’s concept of the “twofoldness” of our experience of pictures: the “visual awareness not only of what is represented but also of the surface qualities of the representation.” I argue for the following four claims: (a) the depicted scene is represented by ventral perception, (b) the depicted scene is not represented by dorsal perception, (c) the picture surface is represented by dorsal perception, and (d) the picture surface is not necessarily represented by ventral perceptio

Besides Looking: Patrimony, Perfomativity and Visual Cultures

David Dibosa’s paper, 'Besides Looking: Patrimony, Performativity and Visual Cultures in National Art Museums', is an exploration and a further elaboration of the relations between the development of visual media practices within the research – what we have previously indicated as stemming from practice-based research approaches – and transmigrational visual cultures. David asks how perspectives derived from the study and articulation of Visual Cultures, (Hall, Mirzoeff, Evans, Rogoff) might usefully frame our understanding of transmigrational ‘viewing strategies’ and more specifically the practices of Tate Encounters’ participants. He introduces an important counter to the idea that either the art museum or the research framing can address the transmigrational viewer other than in an engagement at the point of viewing. This stresses the dynamic, rather than settled, historical sense of migrant experience that has become contained in notions of ‘heritage’, and ethnic categorisations. He looks to performativity to offer a way out of the impasse of categorisation and his focus upon transmigrational experience as fluid leads him to the idea that a corresponding art museum viewing strategy might be that “which has not yet been seen” or “a kind of seeing on the move”

Affordances, context and sociality

Affordances, i.e. the opportunity of actions offered by the environment, are one of the central research topics for the theoretical perspectives that view cognition as emerging from the interaction between the environment and the body. Being at the bridge between perception and action, affordances help to question a dichotomous view of perception and action. While Gibson’s view of affordances is mainly externalist, many contemporary approaches define affordances (and micro-affordances) as the product of long-term visuomotor associations in the brain. These studies have emphasized the fact that affordances are activated automatically, independently from the context and the previous intention to act: for example, affordances related to objects’ size would emerge even if the task does not require focusing on size. This emphasis on the automaticity of affordances has led to overlook their flexibility and contextual-dependency. In this contribution I will outline and discuss recent perspectives and evidence that reveal the flexibility and context-dependency of affordances, clarifying how they are modulated by the physical, cultural and social context. I will focus specifically on social affordances, i.e. on how perception of affordances might be influenced by the presence of multiple actors having different goals