Attentional Shift and Enactive Perception in Purposeful Agents

The case for enactive perception argues for perception to be understood in the context of sensorimotor activity. Indeed, Rensink (2000) presents visual perception itself as the active indexing of a sparse set of ‘just in time’ scene representations to a rich and detailed world which serves as its own best model (cf. Brooks, 1991). Attention mediates this mapping, but discussion tends not to relate this to the overall activity of the agent enactive perception serves. The view is presented here that situationally appropriate interactions with the world mostly rely on valid conceptions of it; selective attention serves to maintain the integrity of a situated, embodied agent’s knowledge and understanding of that world. It is thought this view is compatible with Rensink’s view of visual cognition and enactive perception in general.