PerceptionAction

Sensory input for conscious perception and control of action

Is the sensory input which forms our conscious percept of the world the same as the sensory input which is used to control our actions? This is a line of work I've dipped into, almost in spite of myself. My research on these themes goes along two separate paths.

First, I've done some work looking at the classic 'how action parameters are affected by visual illusions' work pioneered by Milner and Goodale. Recently we've shown that grip aperture scaling is influenced by illusory size differences (in the context of the Ponzo Illusion), but only over the first few grasps. Conscious perception of visual illusions is, by contrast, static and unchanging. These findings suggest that there are separate rates of adaptation for perception and action, which might reconcile some of the disparate finding in the literature (you get different levels of dissociation depending on your number and type of practice trials). The paper can be found here.

My other studies along this line look at a more high-level version of this question - can illusions influence sporting performance (rather than kinematic variables per se)? This is some work which has its roots in the work of Dennis Proffitt and his version of embodied cognition, which suggests that perception is inherently linked to action capabilities. I've looked at this in the context of the size-weight illusion and weightlifting behaviour, and found that the illusion does not affect your exercise capacity. But I suspect that this is far from the end of the story. That particular paper can be found here.