Perception is a function of action: The sunset of computational metaphor and its implications for teaching of Physical Education

According to the latest scientific perspective, mechanisms specialized in action-oriented visuospatial perception and processing involve cognitive mechanisms, or, if preferred, “the brain uses a spatial language” (Berthoz, 2011). Environment and space, in this view, cannot be separated, according to the work of Merleau-Ponty(M. Merleau-Ponty, 1962), from the perceiver: You can know reality only in experiential learning.Perception, in this perspective, is not a moment separate from action in an algorithmic process (perception-elaboration-action) but is part of action, indeed, it is a function of action. There is no perception, there is no vision of the world that does not refer to the moving body in space.More precisely, the body in action resolves complexity in a process of perception-action which, according to the most recent findings of neuroscience, is reversed with respect to the cognitivist paradigm. Leman (Leman, 2008) summarizes: “what happens in perception can be understood in terms of action”. We participate to a reversal of the classical description of the mechanisms of perception and action that places the intentional and goal-oriented subject at the origin of the process. The subject builds his world according to his basic needs and action tools. From the educational point of view, this leads to the disintegration of cognitivist methodological model, based on a concept of information-processing that underlies the perception-action stages as a discrete, separate and non-overlapping stages. This model, which is still dominant in the practice of Physical Education teaching, results in a fragmentation of the action, divided into sequential stages, according to the practices of the partial exercise, randomized exercise and varied exercise. This behaviorist/cognitivist idea of teaching is immediately understandable because it focuses its attention to the relationship between teaching and observable performance, studying the teaching strategies capable of producing feedback that may increase the likelihood of a result or replicate or improve performance.