Abstract
There is an ongoing debate under what conditions learned object sizes influence visuomotor control under preserved stereovision. Using meaningful objects (matchboxes of locally well-known brands in the UK) a previous study has nicely shown that the recognition of these objects influences action programming by means of reach amplitude and grasp pre-shaping even under binocular vision. Using the same paradigm, we demonstrated that short-term learning of colour-size associations was not sufficient to induce any visuomotor effects under binocular viewing conditions. Now we used the same matchboxes, for which the familiarity effect was shown in the UK, with German participants who have never seen these objects before. We addressed the question whether simply a high degree of distinctness, or whether instead actual prior familiarity of these objects, are required to affect motor computations. We found that under monocular and binocular viewing conditions the learned size and location influenced the amplitude of the reaching component significantly. In contrast, the maximum grip aperture remained unaffected for binocular vision. We conclude that visual distinctness is sufficient to form reliable associations in short-term learning to influence reaching even for preserved stereovision. Grasp pre-shaping instead seems to be less susceptible to such perceptual effects.
Highlights
Grasping objects in our everyday life usually involves motor programming of our hand movements towards the target and the recognition of these objects in order to plan an appropriate action
The familiar size of an object is a specific pictorial depth cue and depends by definition on object recognition. This learned pictorial information becomes important for action programming when other cues, like binocular depth cues to estimate target distance, are either not reliable or reduced [3]
They hypothesised that other cues provided by binocular vision were much more reliable to diminish the effect of familiar size
Summary
Grasping objects in our everyday life usually involves motor programming of our hand movements towards the target and the recognition of these objects in order to plan an appropriate action. It had been suggested that visuomotor guidance is predominantly processed in the dorsal (occipitoparietal) stream, while object recognition depends critically on the ventral (occipito-temporal) stream [1] How these streams of information are interacting to produce a meaningful action is not clear yet and it is still a matter of debate to which extent perceptual judgements affect the programming of grasping movements (for a review see [2]). The familiar size of an object is a specific pictorial depth cue and depends by definition on object recognition This learned pictorial information becomes important for action programming when other cues, like binocular depth cues to estimate target distance, are either not reliable or reduced [3]. Marotta et al [9] concluded that the ability to use these pictorial cues for visuomotor programming relies on an intact ventral stream
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