Action-driven attentional recruitment

• Applicant: Professor Martin Fischer
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2013 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 237128964

There is increasing evidence that visual selection can be driven by actions, in particular by those which are programmed and achieved with our hands. Attention is affected by hand placement; it is deployed toward locations for which hand movements are planned and is affected by hand posture and hand action (e.g., pointing or grasping). Most research exploring the interaction between manual action and visual perception has generally focused on the study of discrete end-point movements or static hand postures. However, in everyday action situations it is often the case that the target for action is chosen while the hands are in motion, either still interacting with a previous target or sweeping across space during acquisition of the next target. We therefore propose a study that explores such effects of continuous motion and dynamic change of hand posture on the allocation of visual attention. Discrimination probes will be presented across the manual workspace and their processing will be measured. This approach will allow us to examine whether the same mechanisms that drive attention in movement planning and programmed action are also active during the motion period, and to investigate the time course of visual selection in accordance with manual action. In addition, employing various visual tasks and conditions will allow us to study the nature of this action-driven attention allocation. Hence, we will discern whether such allocation has transient or sustained characteristics and whether it is controlled by endogenous (motor planning) or exogenous cues (e.g., proprioceptive input related to the posture and movement of the hand). In this way, the study provides new information about the crosstalk between body schema, motor planning, action execution, and visual processing.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants