On interference effects in concurrent perception and action

Recent studies have reported repulsion effects between the perception of visual motion and the concurrent production of hand movements. Two models, based on the notions of common coding and internal forward modeling, have been proposed to account for these phenomena. They predict that the size of the effects in perception and action should be monotonically related and vary with the amount of similarity between what is produced and perceived. These predictions were tested in four experiments in which participants were asked to make hand movements in certain directions while simultaneously encoding the direction of an independent stimulus motion. As expected, perceived directions were repelled by produced directions, and produced directions were repelled by perceived directions. However, contrary to the models, the size of the effects in perception and action did not covary, nor did they depend (as predicted) on the amount of perception–action similarity. We propose that such interactions are mediated by the activation of categorical representations

Moving stimuli guide retrieval and (in)validation of coordination simulations

According to theories of embodied cognition, visual stimuli can either facilitate or impede the retrieval of language meaning as multimodal perceptual simulations. Here, we introduced a novel experimental paradigm to test the hypothesis that moving stimuli (i.e., motion-defined objects) facilitate coordination comprehension. Participants read coordination descriptions and saw two colored lines that matched the descriptions. Two figures then selected the lines either by moving jointly along them or by standing each on a different line. Moving selections yielded high validation scores in conjunction trials and low validation scores in disjunction trials, whereas stationary selections yielded mitigated scores. The results demonstrate that jointly moving stimuli, which are effective cues to visual grouping, help retrieve and validate conjunction simulations composed of dependent stimuli as well as retrieve and invalidate disjunction simulations composed of independent stimuli. These findings challenge accounts based on truth-condition satisfaction that stimuli properties cannot affect language comprehension and thereby reasoning.7 page(s