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Review
. 2023 Jan 18:74:59-86.
doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-021422-043229.

Rethinking Vision and Action

Ken Nakayama  1 , Jeff Moher  2 , Joo-Hyun Song  3
Affiliations
Review

Rethinking Vision and Action

Ken Nakayama et al. Annu Rev Psychol. .

Abstract

Action is an important arbitrator as to whether an individual or a species will survive. Yet, action has not been well integrated into the study of psychology. Action or motor behavior is a field apart. This is traditional science with its need for specialization. The sequence in a typical laboratory experiment of see → decide → act provides the rationale for broad disciplinary categorizations. With renewed interest in action itself, surprising and exciting anomalous findings at odds with this simplified caricature have emerged. They reveal a much more intimate coupling of vision and action, which we describe. In turn, this prompts us to identify and dwell on three pertinent theories deserving of greater notice.

Keywords: action; attention; consciousness; vision.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
See think/decide and act
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Mirror box (from Ramachandran and Altschuler, 2009)
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Spatial number line concept leaking into motor trajectories. Participants are shown a single-digit Arabic numeral in a center square and asked to compare its value with the standard, five. They then reach for and touch one of three squares on the screen: the left for ‘less than 5’, the center one for ‘equal to 5’, or the right one for ‘greater than 5’. The panels depict examples in which the value of the target is ‘equal to’ (A) or ‘less than’ (B–E) the standard. The lower panels demonstrate gradual shifts of reach trajectories towards the center square as the difference in value between the target and the standard decreases (from Song and Nakayama, 2008b)
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Top row - odd colored target in the midst of varying numbers of opposite color distractors. Bottom left - Perceptual reaction times to identify the side of the truncation as a function of the distractor number (Maljkovic and Nakayama, 1992). Bottom middle: same data for saccades and bottom right, same for pointing (Maljkovic and Nakayama, 1994;McPeek et al.,1999, Song and Nakayama, 2006 ).
Figure 5:
Figure 5:
Time course of priming for perception and saccades, characterizing advantages of a same color for individual trials (Maljkovic and Nakayama, 1994;McPeek et al., 2000). Abscissa is the trial position in the past or future in relation to the current trial.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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    1. Altschuler EL, Wisdom SB, Stone L, Foster C, Galasko D, Llewellyn DME, & Ramachandran VS (1999). Rehabilitation of hemiparesis after stroke with a mirror. The Lancet, 353(9169), 2035–36. - PubMed
    1. Andersen RA, Aflalo T, Kellis S. 2019. From thought to action: The brain–machine interface in posterior parietal cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(52): 26274–9. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Andersen RA, Mountcastle VB. 1983. The influence of the angle of gaze upon the excitability of the light-sensitive neurons of the posterior parietal cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 3(3): 532–48. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Baars BJ. 1993. A cognitive theory of consciousness. Cambridge University Press.

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