Abstract
Despite diverse research efforts, perceptual experience remains poorly understood. Sensorimotor-Contingency theory proposes that aspects of perception can be explained in terms of sensorimotor contingencies—rule like regularities in the ways that actions affect sensory input. This paper presents a new experimental method for studying how people explore novel sensorimotor contingencies. The method is simple and minimalistic, involving a single sensory ‘dimension’ (the colour of a visual stimulus) that is influenced by a single motor ‘dimension’ (left-right mouse movements). The stimulus changes as a function of mouse movements, providing a novel sensorimotor contingency to human participants. Recordings of mouse movements and stimuli presented are then used to analyse how people explore novel sensorimotor contingencies.
We conducted two preliminary experiments that use this basic method. In these experiments, we recorded the sensorimotor dynamics of 50 human participants. We present our preliminary analysis of these recordings. In this analysis, we tried to identify what strategies participants might have used to explore the new sensorimotor contingencies. We considered three basic strategies: (i) seeking out less common stimuli, (ii) maximising future influence of subsequent stimuli, and (iii) seeking out particular stimuli (e.g. preferring a particular colour stimulus). Our early analysis suggests that the strategy employed varies between participants and is sensitive to experimental conditions, such as the colours of the stimuli presented.