Is there any processing going on during movement?

Clarifying terminology and usage.

Process as a term has some flexibility to it.

When we criticize information processing, we’re not saying—or at least, I’m not saying—there is no form of process whatsoever.

I’m criticizing the view that sense perceptions need to be translated from stimulus data through a series of steps into usable information for action. This is where the representations pop up to explain how that data gets organized into something the brain can comprehend and then translate into nerve impulses, producing movement.

The most obvious problem with the representations view is that it has created a network of presuppositions that limit our beliefs about what can actually be done. The explanations of how things work do not explain what you can see yourself if you just stick a novice into a well-designed CLA game. Some IP proponents would tell you what happens there is impossible—and yet there it is, for you to observe.

Secondly, there’s the empirical problem. The schema or representations has explanatory power, but it’s not directly observable. It’s a black box: we don’t know where they instantiate, what they look like, or how they exactly function beyond a broad level.

So as a form of scientific inquiry, the representations have an establishment problem. While some models find it impossible to explain human movement without postulating representations, that doesn’t mean that on all models of movement the representations are a necessary explanatory assumption.

Now, is there another way in which we might describe processing? Well sense perception has to be translated into movement, so maybe you could describe the stimulation of the organs and concurrent impulses to produce movement throughout the movement system as a sort of process. But even that process is not a linear set of steps, since there’s an ongoing calibration between the entire system providing input via movement to feed forward more action.

There’s a difference between phenomenology and the mechanisms of how the phenomenon emerges into experience. The ecological approach broadly is trying to talk about observable relationships and is less so concerned with the lowest levels of mechanical contribution to the relationships.

For this purpose ecological dynamics has a terminology which seeks to avoid the baggage of some technical terms—that inherently smuggle in assumptions that EcoD is challenging—and explains relationships in relational terms.