About the role of bottom-up and top-down processes on perception–action interaction in sensorimotor transformations

ABSTRACT

Theories of common-coding propose that feature codes of perceived and to-be-produced events are likely to interact with each other when they overlap. We investigated the impact of bottom-up and top-down processes on cross talk in a motor replication task. Participants moved a pen on a covered digitizer tablet while a gain varied the relation between hand and cursor amplitude. Then, participants replicated the hand amplitude (intra-modal) or the cursor amplitude (intermodal) without visual feedback. We replicated that, when the not-to-be-replicated amplitude was longer (shorter) than the to-be-replicated amplitude, replications significantly overshot (undershot) (= after-effects). Importantly, after-effects were remarkably smaller in the experimental groups which wore gloves (thin and thick rubber) or goggles (clear and tinted lenses) than in a control group. Our results provide evidence that top-down attention modulated perception–action interaction.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual perception
• tactile perception
• proprioceptive perception
• cross talk
• focused attention

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Martina Adam, Christian Böffel, Maike Ebbert, Maryvonne Granowski, Stefanie Iländer, Alina Johann, Anna-Lena Köhler, and Miriam Rothe for their research support as well as all participants of the experiment at RWTH Aachen University (Germany).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the German Science Foundation (DFG Mu 1298/10).