Biography

Kevin O’Regan is ex-director of the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, CNRS, Université Paris Descartes. After early work on eye movements in reading, he was led to question established notions of the nature of visual perception and to discover, with collaborators, the phenomenon of “change blindness”. In 2011 he published a book with Oxford University Press: “Why red doesn’t sound like a bell. Understanding the feel of consciousness”. In 2013 he obtained a five-year Advanced ERC grant to explore his “sensorimotor” approach to consciousness in relation to sensory substitution, pain, color, space perception, developmental psychology and robotics. Currently, within a european FETopen project GoalRobots, he is exploring how young infants learn the structure of their bodies.

Abstract

Intrinsic non-motivation in human infants

I will describe the work we have been doing over the last three years with 3-9 month old human infants, attempting to show how sensorimotor contingencies and intrinsic motivation allow the construction of the infants’ representation of their bodies. Unfortunately we find, contrary to established literature, that babies are not particularly sensitive to the effects of their actions on incoming sensory stimulation. We wonder whether infants are not intrinsically non-motivated to collaborate with adults!