Hauptinhalt

Topinformationen

What makes you move?

Conscious Anticipation and the Ideomotor Hypothesis

8.3293

Dozenten

Beschreibung

The Ideomotor Hypothesis (IMH) establishes a fascinating link between high-level cognitive representation (cf. the "ideo"-part of IMH) and sensorimotor processing, thereby joining top-down and representational accounts with enactive and embodied perspectives on cognition.

According to the IMH, actions are represented in terms of the effect they produce, but not in terms of motor plans or the like. The anticipation of an effect and the intention to produce it allows to trigger and control an appropriate action. IMH also provides an inspiring foil for discussions on how such action-effect connections are learned. IMH posits an explicit hypothesis about the connection of mind and body, which opens a route for empirical investigation of the specific relations & interactions.

In this seminar we will discuss classic and recent accounts on the IMH. An additional source for a qualified discussion and criticism of IMH will be practical experience in visuo-motor imagery, based on simple exercises from e.g. Feldenkrais and Ideokinesis at the beginning of the classes. We will discuss our subjective observations on the conscious representation of movement, intended effects, body, and the sensory signals received, and the qualitative changes these undergo during exercise and learning.