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Methods for Presenting Real-world Objects Under Controlled Laboratory Conditions
Published on: June 21, 2019
How objects become psychologically available: in-itself information and informational mediation for theoretical
Kun Wu1, Jingzhuang Bi1, Zhensong Wang1
1School of Humanities and Social Science, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China.
Abstract:
Psychological science has long examined how subjects perceive, represent, predict, and understand the world. Yet many cognitive theories begin from the assumption that objects are already available to perception or representation, while paying less attention to the prior question of how objects become cognitively accessible before subjective representation. This article addresses this issue through the concept of in-itself information and proposes informational mediation as a conceptual framework for rethinking the mind-world relation. In-itself information refers to the structured disclosure of an object through its states, differences, relations, interactions, and traces prior to a subject's completed representation or interpretation. Situated, embodied, and predictive accounts have clarified organism-environment coupling, action-oriented cognition, and predictive regulation. The present framework reframes a prior condition often left implicit in these accounts by arguing that objects must become available through informational disclosure before they can be perceived, predicted, represented, or acted upon. On this basis, the article reconstructs the traditional subject-object schema as a subject-information-object relation. A psychological object is understood as a relational outcome generated through information disclosed by objects and the subject's perceptual, mnemonic, cognitive, and symbolic operations. The framework further suggests that changes in the organization of object-information, especially in technologically mediated and algorithmically structured environments, may alter the conditions under which psychological objects are formed. The article contributes to theoretical and philosophical psychology by clarifying the pre-representational status of objects and by offering a conceptual model for analyzing cognitive access, psychological object formation, and technologically mediated cognition.
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