The Deep Relevance of Motor Neuroscience

David M. Kaplan
Duke University

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     Last modified: February 14, 2005
     Presentation date: 07/14/2005 2:00 PM in ROZH 107
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Abstract
One of the numerous suggestive ideas contained in P.S. Churchland’s path-breaking book _Neurophilosophy_ was that an understanding of cognition will require conceiving of such processes in the appropriate context of their role and origin in sensorimotor control problems. Taking this suggestion one step further, we can adopt what Wolpert (2001) not unfavorably calls the view of motor chauvinism. From this perspective, production of coordinative movement is the brain’s raison d’être. A corollary is that all sensory and cognitive processes can be viewed as inputs determining future motor outputs. In this paper I suggest that there is much to recommend the motor chauvinistic view. In defending this claim, I will briefly review ways in which thinking about problems of sensorimotor control has already made significant contributions to our understanding of decidedly cognitive phenomena—in particular, understanding the nature of representation and how perceptual experience is dependent upon sensorimotor activity. I will then propose another way in which cognitive processes may reflect this fundamental basis in sensorimotor control, not yet widely discussed in the literature. Defending and elaborating on a view sketched by Gareth Evans (1982; 1985), I will argue that understanding our relatively sophisticated capacity for objective thought about the world might also be fruitfully understood as resulting from a complex interplay of more primitive motor, perceptual and cognitive abilities such as the ability to represent space.