Action in Perception
Source: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262640633/action-in-perception/ ↗
Noë's central argument is that perception is not something that happens to us but something we do — an activity of skilful bodily exploration rather than passive reception of input.
The book develops the enactive approach to perception, drawing on phenomenology and empirical work on change blindness, sensory substitution, and neural plasticity.
Compatible with the Varela/Thompson line but considerably more readable, it offers a clear account of why the computational model of vision as image processing fundamentally misunderstands what seeing is.
For designers and product thinkers, the book reframes the question: you are not presenting information to a passive viewer but shaping the conditions for active perceptual exploration.
Central argument
Noë argues that perception is not a passive process in which the brain receives and decodes sensory input, but an active, skilful engagement between body and environment — something we do rather than something that happens to us. Drawing on empirical phenomena such as change blindness and sensory substitution, as well as neural plasticity research, he mounts a direct challenge to the computational model of vision as internal image processing. The enactive account he develops holds that what we perceive is constituted by our mastery of sensorimotor contingencies: knowing how the world would look if we moved, tilted, or attended differently.
Critique
The enactive framework is most compelling for low-level perceptual phenomena — vision, touch, spatial orientation — but Noë's account strains when extended to higher-order cognition, abstraction, or the kind of symbol-mediated understanding that underlies much of what digital product users actually do. The reliance on phenomenological introspection alongside empirical findings creates a methodological tension: the two modes of evidence are not always reconciled, and critics have questioned whether sensorimotor knowledge is genuinely constitutive of experience or merely a causal precondition for it. A product thinker should also note that the book offers no theory of attention or motivation, which limits its direct applicability to intentional goal-directed behaviour in interfaces.
Why it matters for product
If perception is active exploration rather than passive reception, then the design question shifts from 'what information are we displaying?' to 'what actions are we enabling, and does the interface reward skilled engagement over time?' — a reframe with direct consequences for how a CPO evaluates onboarding, progressive disclosure, and feature discoverability metrics. It also challenges the dominant product analytics paradigm: measuring views or exposures assumes a passive receiver, while an enactive model demands metrics sensitive to interaction quality and the development of user fluency. At the team level, it argues for keeping design and research in close contact with real use contexts rather than abstracting to user archetypes, because perceptual meaning is inseparable from the embodied situation in which it arises.