Robert J. and Nancy D. Carney Institute for Brain Science
Date October 16, 2019
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Study investigates perception and action

Perception and action interact constantly, and a new study by Carney Institute researchers has found that perceptual-discrimination performance improves as actions became more fluent.

Graph and figure from paper
Researchers created four stimulus types in an action task, resulting in different difficulty levels of grasping from hard (low action fluency) to easy (high action fluency). Courtesy photo

The study, published in the journal Psychological Sciences in September, looked at how action fluency affects the sensitivity of early-stage visual perception, such as orientation.

Volunteer participants in the study prepared an action—such as grasping—while concurrently performing an orientation-change-detection task. Researchers found that as actions became more fluent, such as as grasping errors decreased, perceptual-discrimination performance also improved.

“We found that grasping training prior to discrimination enhanced subsequent perceptual sensitivity, supporting the notion of a reciprocal relation between perception and action," said Joo-Hyun Song, an associate professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences who is affiliated with the Carney Institute for Brain Science.

The study is co-authored by Song and Jianfei Guo, a graduate student in Brown’s Department of Cognitive Linguistic & Psychological Sciences. Read the full study.