Integration of Action and Size Perception Through Practice

Abstract

Size perception is known to influence our usual interactions with environment. Numerous studies highlighted that during the visual presentation of an object, the properties of manual actions vary as a function of this object's size. In order to better understand the dynamic variations of relationships between size perception and action, we used an experimental paradigm consisting in two phases. During a previous implicit learning phase, a manual response (right or left) was specifically associated with the appearance of a large or small stimulus. During further test phase, participants were required to prepare a response while discriminating the color of a stimulus (GO/No GO task). We observed that the response execution was faster when the size of the stimulus was congruent with the size that had been associated to this response (during implicit learning phase). These results suggest that when a response usually co-occurs with visual stimuli characterized by a specific size pattern, the response and the size pattern become integrated. Any subsequent preparation and execution of this action are therefore influenced by the reactivation of this visual pattern. This result brings out new insights on how sensorimotor interactions may modulate the ability to anticipate perceptive size variations in the environment.

Size coding of alternative responses is sufficient to induce a potentiation effect with manipulable objects

“…Moreover, such data are particularly interesting because they support the possibility that responses in a two alternative-forcedchoice task could be discriminated not only according to their left/right, far/near or up/down dimensions, but also according to the size dimension. This possibility extends the current version of the TEC and adds the size on the list of critical spatial features of actions (see Camus, Hommel, Brunel &Brouillet, 2018 andCoutté, Camus, Heurley &Brouillet, 2017 for converging evidences). To go further, it is noteworthy that our results cannot be taken as a guarantee that the more classical potentiation effect of grasping behaviors (e.g., Ellis & Tucker, 2000) can only be explained by the size-coding-hypothesis.…”