Reexamining visual cognition
in human infants:
On the necessity of representation
2001, Behavioral and Brain
Sciences, 24, 1003-1004
Matthew Schlesinger
Southern Illinois University
Abstract: The sensorimotor
account of vision proposed by O'Regan & Noë challenges
the classical view of visual cognition as a process of
mentally representing the world. Many infant cognition
researchers would probably disagree. I describe the surprising
ability of young infants to represent and reason about
the physical world, and ask how this capacity can be explained
in non-representational terms. As a first step toward
answering this question, I suggest that recent models
of embodied cognition may help illustrate a way of escaping
the representational trap.
