The Structure of Perception and Action

Abstract

In general approach, the present book reverses the traditional strategy discussed in Chapter 1 of treating perception and action separately, because I begin with the evidence for shared perception-production units, which play a role in both perception and action. By taking up action next, the book also reverses the traditional strategy of giving priority to perception. I attempt first to specify a detailed set of theoretical processes for sequencing and timing the production of speech and other skilled behaviors involving shared perception-production components. I then examine how these shared perception-production components give rise to perception, and I develop a theory with applications to classical perceptual problems such as categorical perception, perceptual invariance, the nature of perceptual errors, perception of the distal stimulus, perception of sequential inputs, and the problem of ambiguity in perception.

I have devoted so much time to the discussion of the problem of syntax, not only because language is one of the most important products of human cerebral action, but also because the problems raised by the organization of language seem to me to be characteristic of almost all other cerebral activity. There is a series of hierarchies of organization; the order of vocal movements in pronouncing the words, the order of words in the sentence, the order of sentences in the paragraph, the rational order of paragraphs in a discourse.

(Lashley, 1951, pp. 121–122)