EPS Mid-Career Award 2009: From Observation to Action Simulation: The Role of Attention, Eye-Gaze, Emotion, and Body State

Abstract

This paper reviews recent aspects of my research. It focuses, first, on the idea that during the perception of objects and people, action-based representations are automatically activated and, second, that such action representations can feed back and influence the perception of people and objects. For example, when one is merely viewing an object such as a coffee cup, the action it affords, such as a reach to grasp, is activated even though there is no intention to act on the object. Similarly, when one is observing a person's behaviour, their actions are automatically simulated, and such action simulation can influence our perception of the person and the object with which they interacted. The experiments to be described investigate the role of attention in such vision-to-action processes, the effects of such processes on emotion, and the role of a perceiver's body state in their interpretation of visual stimuli.