CONCEPT
Sensorimotor Contingencies
The lawful relationships between movement and sensory change that perceivers implicitly master — the practical knowledge that the apple will look different as you move around it, that the coffee cup will feel heavier if you lift it faster.
Sensorimotor contingency theory, developed by J. Kevin O'Regan and Alva Noë in a 2001 paper, holds that perception consists in the exercise of implicit practical knowledge about how sensory inputs change in response to bodily movement. To see is to implicitly know how visual appearance will vary with eye movement, head turn, and locomotion. To hear is to implicitly know how auditory experience will shift with movement toward or away from the source. This knowledge is not propositional; it is a bodily skill, a capacity for coordinated perception and action. The theory provides the operational core of Noë's enactive approach to perception.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The sensorimotor contingency theory was first articulated in J. Kevin O'Regan and Alva Noë's 2001 paper 'A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness' in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, which became one of the most cited and debated papers in consciousness studies. The paper