Close your eyes and follow the contour of the table in front of you. When you reach the end of it, do you think you would be able to continue moving your hand along the same imaginary line as if the table went on a little further? Most people would not have any problem doing this for a wide variety of conditions (body posture, distance and angle with respect to the table, etc.) Given this variety of circumstances, traditional approaches to perception and motor control postulate when we’re no longer in contact with the table, we must be using some form of representation that keeps guiding the arm along the same invisible line in a robust manner.
Together with Thomas Buhrmann, we have demonstrated that representations are not necessarily the only explanation, and that indeed it is possible to attune the movement of your arm to the world without at any point involving any internal models or representations, but simply by a shaping of dynamical sensorimotor transients. The “memory” of the direction of movement is kept in the whole agent-environment system in a way that generalizes across various relative positions and angles of movement.
For more information see:
Buhrmann, T. and Di Paolo, E. A. (2014). Non-representational sensorimotor knowledge. In A.P. del Pobil et al. (Eds.): From Animals to Animats 13, Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, SAB 2014, LNAI 8575, pp. 21–31, NY, Springer Verlag.
EZEQUIEL A. DI PAOLO 