This chapter focuses on the perception of visually presented instrumental behavior. Instrumental behavior can be subdivided into simple body movements (operations), actions, and activities. Highly automatized simple body movements, such as walking or grasping, are the basis of simple intentional actions, such as lighting a cigarette. Perceiving an action requires a linkage of movements, intentions, and effects. The perception of symbolic actions, such as signing a contract, or more complex activities that include many actions, such as preparing a birthday party, requires a semantic integration of the visual features of movement and actions, verbal communications, and prior knowledge. Without denying the role of semantic integration, the chapter focuses on perceptual aspects. It present and compares six approaches addressing the perception of visually presented behavior, its intentions, and its effects.

This chapter presents three aspects of attention: (1) attention as selection (the cocktail party studies); (2) attention as set (the temporal allocation studies); and (3) attention as organizing the auditory environment (the streaming and auditory illusion studies). The chapter also discusses doubts that could be cast upon some well-known studies that expressed much optimism about the fate of unattended messages, advocating that there is an inherent confounding of attentional selection features in the dichotic paradigm. Good example of a study that explicitly investigated the temporal allocation of attention in a single speech stream is based on Martin's model for rhythmic structure in speech and other behavior, which states that speech elements are hierarchically organized, providing an underlying temporal structure within which elements are related instead of being simply concatenated. The sequences of nine tones have been constructed from a three-tone argument by applying certain rules. A three-tone argument comprised, for instance, the increasing musical tones G4, A4, and B4 from the C major scale. The three-tone argument has been preceded and succeeded by three-tone patterns resulting from one or two higher rules, which yielded melodic strings.

Publisher Summary Perceptual constancies are tendencies for the appearances of objects to remain unaltered as their sensory correlates vary. This chapter examines the divergence and presents a framework aimed toward a synthesis. Constancy research has been focused on perception as opposed to performance in part, because the research has been guided by linear models of perception–action relationships, according to which all sensory guided action is based on perception. However, diverging theories construct and operations suggest that linear models cannot account for constancy data. It has been suggested that a synthesis should be sought in the ecological efference mediation theory, a multilinear model with multiple representations of spatial layout.

Dual-task performance is a field of study where basic and applied research merges. This chapter presents three-step development in dual-task performance. With the development, dual-tasks as a method for the study of general individual-task characteristics, such as automaticity or mental load become obsolete. Instead dual-tasks become a useful method for the study of structures or functions involved in the performance of individual tasks. A final step in the theoretical and methodological development is to apply a more fine-grained analysis to dual-task performance. An adapted control system should realize selectivity, coupling among different output devices, and protection of ongoing outputs. Such adaptation, of course, will turn out to be detrimental to performance in many dual-tasks. Whenever dual-tasks require physically incompatible actions, the available time has to be split between the different tasks. In general, the time-sharing of physically incompatible actions has not attracted very much research effort, but there are exceptions such as monitoring of several different displays.

Publisher Summary Catching has attracted considerable attention in the psychological literature from two perspectives: motor development and human performance/motor learning. Historically, motor development research has been largely descriptive in nature and directed toward developmental changes in the patterns of movement coordination with age, primarily as observed in phylogenetic skills, such as walking, running, crawling, and sucking. In contrast, motor learning research has been largely addressed either to theoretical questions using narrowly constrained laboratory tasks or, on limited occasions, ontogenetic skills—such as driving a motor vehicle, typewriting, or piloting an aircraft. This chapter sketches out a coherent research line over the past few decades—that can be categorized under the rubric human performance/motor learning. The chapter focuses on the development of catching behavior in which there is much less coherency, but a number of interesting experimental lines that provide prospects for future work.

Publisher Summary This chapter examines the processes required for motor learning. It focuses on the psychological processes of motor learning. Central to this endeavor is the notion of representation: the psychological structures and processes that allow utilizing past experience in improving motor behavior. The chapter discusses learning curves that provide a macroscopic analysis of the way performance changes with practice. It focuses on the examination of different theoretical accounts of the way regularities in learning curves manifest changes in the representation of skill. The chapter describes a different aspect of the constraints on skilled performance. The chapter presents the theories of motor learning. The selected theories are representative of present work in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and computational modeling.

Publisher Summary This chapter reviews the origins of energetics and attention during the first stages of experimental psychology and illustrates (1) the use of the concept of energy in psychological theorizing; (2) some speculations on the neural substrate of attentional states; and (3) procedures developed to relate those states to performance efficiency. The chapter also presents the revival in the study of attention and physiological arousal and the rebirth of the study of the reaction process after its disappearance during the behavioristic era and an example of a recent hybrid model of the reaction process in which, energetic constructs have been integrated within a stage conceptualization of the reaction process. The current renaissance of energetical thinking does not uncover new views on attention but rather stimulates the use of new running threads (RT) methods and powerful brain technology in the interest of old ideas, the solidity of which has been proven during more than a century of experimental psychology.

This chapter provides an overview of the research on involuntary attention, particularly with the conditions in which it occurs. Involuntary attention in this contribution refers to the processes of attending that are not elicited by intentions but by certain outside events. The discussion is fully limited to specific processes of attending, elicited by the deviation of stimulus events from a given context. There are probably various types of other outside events that can elicit processes of involuntary—that is, unintentional and attending. The relevant processes are involuntary to the extent to which they are determined by outside events, and a specific in the sense that the events are defined in relation to the situational context—namely, as deviants from that context. Thus, voluntary and involuntary attending are distinguished only by the way in which they are elicited. The question of whether involuntary attention exists in the sense of an independent attention system remains fully open.