NoteControlling attention through action: Observing actions primes action-related stimulus dimensions
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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Kinematic priming of action predictions
2023, Current BiologyAttentional prioritization reconfigures novel instructions into action-oriented task sets
2020, CognitionCitation Excerpt :This would allow observing if attention by itself generates IBR effects, even without the intention to implement. Our results resonate with the general idea that attention and action are tightly intertwined (e.g. Allport, 1987) and, in particular, with theoretical accounts that propose a bidirectional influence of action information in attentional processing (Fagioli, Ferlazzo, & Hommel, 2007; Fagioli, Hommel, & Schubotz, 2007; Soto, Hodsoll, Rotshtein, & Humphreys, 2008). In this regard, previous studies have revealed that novel instructions can modulate early attentional processes (Tibboel, Liefooghe, & De Houwer, 2016).
Partner reactions and task set selection: Compatibility is more beneficial in the stronger task
2018, Acta PsychologicaCitation Excerpt :For instance, when subjects had been planning a grasping action, they were better at subsequently detecting a size oddball in a sequence of visual stimuli, whereas when they had been planning a reaching action, they were better at detecting a location oddball (Fagioli, Hommel, & Schubotz, 2007b). With regard to the present study, the most interesting finding is that such selective priming of task features even occurred when subjects did not actively plan the reaching or grasping action themselves but merely observed another person carrying it out (Fagioli, Ferlazzo, & Hommel, 2007a). This suggests that mentally representing a partner's task has the potential to guide people's attention in their own task.
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2018, NeuroImageCitation Excerpt :This suggests that they anticipated fingerings that matched with their structure-based plans. Crucially, the stronger decrease in beta power indicates that classical pianists were overall motorically more prepared to encode the fingering of the displayed action (Candidi et al., 2014; Fagioli et al., 2007; Hommel, 2010), potentially facilitating error detection in the photos (Koelewijn et al., 2008) and supporting own execution (Ruiz et al., 2011; Tzagarakis et al., 2010). Interestingly, the similar beta power decrease found in jazz pianists, but for harmonic violations (as discussed above), may express the differential habitual action focus after specialized training.
Reading action word affects the visual perception of biological motion
2011, Acta PsychologicaCitation Excerpt :Likewise, the perception of human movements improves following the learning of a new motor-skill congruent with the observed movement (Casile & Giese, 2006) or even when simply executing the action before performing the perceptual task (Bidet-Ildei, Chauvin, & Coello, 2010). Planning a goal-directed motor action seems even sufficient to improve the perceptual sensitivity to those events in the environment that are directly related to the motoric specification of this particular action (Bekkering & Neggers, 2002; Fagioli, Ferlazzo, & Hommel, 2007). Then, enriching our motor experience positively influences our capacities to perceive human actions (e.g., Bidet-Ildei et al., 2010; Calvo-Merino, Glaser, Grezes, Passingham, & Haggard, 2005; Cross, Hamilton, & Grafton, 2006; Loula, Prasad, Harber, & Shiffrar, 2005).
Learning how actions function: The role of outcomes in infants' representation of events
2011, Infant Behavior and DevelopmentCitation Excerpt :For example, representing a light switch being flipped involves encoding the kinematics required to execute the goal of flipping the switch to achieve the outcome to bring light. Hommel and colleagues (Elsner & Hommel, 2004; Fagioli, Ferlazzo, & Hommel, 2007) proposed a second model. Their common coding hypothesis posits that associative learning mechanisms allow sensory events that reliably co-occur with actions to become integrated with those actions.