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Controlling attention through action: Observing actions primes action-related stimulus dimensions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.06.012Get rights and content

Abstract

Previous findings suggest that planning an action “backward-primes” perceptual dimension related to this action: planning a grasp facilitates the processing of visual size information, while planning a reach facilitates the processing of location information. Here we show that dimensional priming of perception through action occurs even in the absence of active action planning. Subjects watched video clips showing a grasping or reaching action before detecting size- or location-defined deviants in visual stimulus sequences. Size deviants were detected faster after seeing a grasp and location deviants were detected faster after seeing a reach. This supports the assumption that perceptual codes and action plans share a common representational medium, and that “attention to action” controls “attention to stimuli”.

Section snippets

Participants

Thirteen students (8 males) aged 20–26 voluntarily participated for class credits. Participants were right-handed with normal or corrected to normal vision, and were naive as to the purposes of the experiment.

Apparatus and stimuli

Participants sat in a dimly lit room facing a 21 in. monitor (Silicon Graphics 550, 800 × 600 pixels, 32 bit color) at a distance of 60 cm. Stimulus presentation and response recording were controlled through the Cogent 2000 toolbox running under Matlab 6.5.

A white asterisk displayed at the

Results

Anticipations (reaction times, RTs < 100 ms), missing responses (RTs > 1000 ms) and incorrect responses were considered as errors and excluded from analysis. Mean RTs were computed for each experimental condition and fed into a 2 × 2 ANOVA, considering action (grasping versus reaching) and stimulus dimension (size versus location) as within-subjects factors. The Mauchley Sphericity test performed on the mean RTs did not show any significant effect, providing evidence that the homoscedasticity

Discussion

Our findings suggest that perceptual feature dimensions can be primed not only through the active preparation of actions that are related to these dimensions (Fagioli et al., 2007) but also as a consequence of merely watching such actions. This provides strong evidence for the idea that activating an action plan is sufficient to backward prime action-related perceptual dimensions. Apparently, then, activating an action representation – be that voluntarily, as in the process of planning an

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