Binding in voluntary action control

Abstract

The last decade has seen a proliferation of empirical studies that seek to understand how the cognitive system links voluntary motor actions with their perceptual effects. A view that has found considerable support in this research is the ideomotor approach to action control which holds that actors select, initiate, and execute a movement by activating anticipatory codes of the movement's sensory effects. We, first review the empirical evidence from different paradigms showing that effects of voluntary actions become anticipated during response production. In a second step we survey empirical data investigating the nature of the mechanisms that link voluntary motor actions with their intended and expected perceptual effects. We argue that the integration, or binding, of perceptual and motor codes occurs in action planning where features of intended effects are selectively bound to features of the actions that are selected to achieve these effects in the environment. As a final step we will summarize empirical findings that may elucidate the particular roles of effect-code activation in response production and control.