Abstract
Action preparation can facilitate performance in tasks of visual perception, for instance by speeding up responses to action-relevant stimulus features. However, it is unknown whether this facilitation reflects an influence on early perceptual processing, or instead post-perceptual processes. In three experiments, a combination of psychophysics and electroencephalography was used to investigate whether visual features are influenced by action preparation at the perceptual level. Participants were cued to prepare oriented reach-to-grasp actions before discriminating target stimuli oriented in the same direction as the prepared grasping action (congruent) or not (incongruent). As expected, stimuli were discriminated faster if their orientation was congruent, compared to incongruent, with the prepared action. However, action-congruency had no influence on perceptual sensitivity, regardless of cue-target interval and discrimination difficulty. The reaction time effect was not accompanied by modulations of early visual-evoked potentials. Instead, beta-band (13–30 Hz) synchronization over sensorimotor brain regions was influenced by action preparation, indicative of improved response preparation. Together, the results suggest that action preparation may not modulate early visual processing of orientation, but likely influences higher order response or decision related processing. While early effects of action on spatial perception are well documented, separate mechanisms appear to govern non-spatial feature selection.
Highlights
Evidence for a tight coupling between action and perception has shown that perceptual processing can influence subsequent motor behaviour[1,2]
While reaction times were affected by grasp congruency and the difficulty of the discrimination, there was no interaction between these factors
We investigated if planned actions influence reaction times as well as perceptual sensitivity (d’) to discriminate visual stimuli that share a feature with a prepared action
Summary
Evidence for a tight coupling between action and perception has shown that perceptual processing can influence subsequent motor behaviour[1,2]. While there is some evidence that preparation for different types of actions (e.g. grasping, reaching or pointing) can speed responses and sharpen estimations of stimulus size[16] and orientation[17], these studies focused on priming feature perception at a more general dimensional level. These effects tap into how the planning and execution of the invariant characteristics of a movement (i.e. select what action should be executed such as a non-specific reach or grasp) affects the weighing of feature dimensions in visual search. Perception may be biased in accordance with what overall action is prepared (e.g. grasping versus pointing), but perception may be biased in accordance with how a specific action is accomplished (e.g. grasping at a specific location and degree of orientation)
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