{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,11]],"date-time":"2025-10-11T01:21:18Z","timestamp":1760145678789,"version":"build-2065373602"},"reference-count":53,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"8","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2024,8,21]],"date-time":"2024-08-21T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1724198400000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100004837","name":"Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["PID2021-127046NA-I00","CEX2021-001169-M MCIN\/AEI\/10.13039\/501100011033","2021-SGR-00276"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["PID2021-127046NA-I00","CEX2021-001169-M MCIN\/AEI\/10.13039\/501100011033","2021-SGR-00276"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100004837","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100002809","name":"Generalitat de Catalunya","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["PID2021-127046NA-I00","CEX2021-001169-M MCIN\/AEI\/10.13039\/501100011033","2021-SGR-00276"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["PID2021-127046NA-I00","CEX2021-001169-M MCIN\/AEI\/10.13039\/501100011033","2021-SGR-00276"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100002809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"name":"VERSES AI","award":["PID2021-127046NA-I00","CEX2021-001169-M MCIN\/AEI\/10.13039\/501100011033","2021-SGR-00276"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["PID2021-127046NA-I00","CEX2021-001169-M MCIN\/AEI\/10.13039\/501100011033","2021-SGR-00276"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Entropy"],"abstract":"<jats:p>A typical claim in anti-representationalist approaches to cognition such as ecological psychology or radical embodied cognitive science is that ecological information is sufficient for guiding behavior. According to this view, affordances are immediately perceptually available to the agent (in the so-called \u201cambient energy array\u201d), so sensory data does not require much further inner processing. As a consequence, mental representations are explanatorily idle: perception is immediate and direct. Here we offer one way to formalize this direct-perception claim and identify some important limits to it. We argue that the claim should be read as saying that successful behavior just implies picking out affordance-related information from the ambient energy array. By relying on the Partial Information Decomposition framework, and more concretely on its development of the notion of synergy, we show that in multimodal perception, where various energy arrays carry affordance-related information, the \u201cjust pick out affordance-related information\u201d approach is very inefficient, as it is bound to miss all synergistic components. Efficient multimodal information combination requires transmitting sensory-specific (and not affordance-specific) information to wherever it is that the various information streams are combined. The upshot is that some amount of computation is necessary for efficient affordance reconstruction.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/e26080708","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2024,8,26]],"date-time":"2024-08-26T03:32:01Z","timestamp":1724643121000},"page":"708","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Synergy Makes Direct Perception Inefficient"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"26","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0008-3287-0082","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Miguel","family":"de Llanza Varona","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Engineering and Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9RH, UK"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-6194-7121","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Manolo","family":"Mart\u00ednez","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Philosophy Department, Universitat de Barcelona, 08001 Barcelona, Spain"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2024,8,21]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"718","DOI":"10.1080\/09515089.2021.2014802","article-title":"Cognition as the Sensitive Management of an Agent\u2019s Behavior","volume":"35","author":"Akagi","year":"2022","journal-title":"Philos. 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