Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom.
Cognition. 2019 Nov;192:103985. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.05.022. Epub 2019 Jun 21.
Many species rely on the three-dimensional surface layout of an environment to find a desired goal following disorientation. They generally do so to the exclusion of other important spatial cues. Two influential frameworks for explaining that phenomenon are provided by geometric-module theories and view-matching theories of reorientation respectively. The former posit a module that operates only on representations of the global geometry of three-dimensional surfaces to guide behavior. The latter place snapshots, stored representations of the subject's two-dimensional retinal stimulation at specific locations, at the heart of their accounts. In this paper, I take a fresh look at the debate between them. I begin by making a case that the empirical evidence we currently have does not clearly favor one framework over the other, and that the debate has reached something of an impasse. Then, I present a new explanatory problem-the representation selection problem-that offers the prospect of breaking the impasse by introducing a new type of explanatory consideration that both frameworks must address. The representation selection problem requires explaining how subjects can reliably select the relevant representation with which they initiate the reorientation process. I argue that the view-matching framework does not have the resources to address this problem, while a certain type of theory within the geometric-module framework can provide a natural response to it. In showing this, I develop a new geometric-module theory.
许多物种依赖于环境的三维表面布局来在迷失方向后找到期望的目标。它们通常这样做是为了排除其他重要的空间线索。分别有两个有影响力的框架来解释这种现象，一个是几何模块理论，另一个是重新定向的视图匹配理论。前者假设存在一个模块，该模块仅在三维表面全局几何的表示上运行，以指导行为。后者则将主体在特定位置的二维视网膜刺激的存储表示作为其解释的核心。在本文中，我对它们之间的争论进行了新的审视。我首先提出一个观点，即我们目前拥有的经验证据并没有明确偏向于其中一个框架，而且这场争论已经陷入了僵局。然后，我提出了一个新的解释问题——表示选择问题，该问题通过引入一种新的解释性考虑因素，为打破僵局提供了前景，两种框架都必须解决该问题。表示选择问题需要解释主体如何能够可靠地选择与他们启动重新定向过程相关的表示。我认为，视图匹配框架没有解决这个问题的资源，而几何模块框架中的某种类型的理论可以对此问题提供自然的回应。通过这样做，我提出了一个新的几何模块理论。
