Perception-Action

Knowledge of the spatial layout of bodies is mediated by a representation called the body structural description, damage to which results in the condition of autotopagnosia in which patients are impaired in judgments about the location and configuration of body parts. While a large literature has investigated disruption of the body structural description, little research has examined its accuracy in healthy individuals. I show that people have systematically distorted knowledge of the configuration of hands. Participants judged the location of their knuckles (i.e., the metacarpophalangeal joint) by pointing with a baton on their palm. Participants showed clear distal biases, judging their knuckles as farther forward in the hand than they actually are for all fingers except the thumb. This effect appeared both when participants localized the knuckles of their own hand and another person's hand. These results suggest that intuitive beliefs about body form are systematically distorted.

I have this copy of book last year because of the emerging issues about the descriptions to Manila the author had written.  I'm through on reading this book and the ideas that Dan Brown wants to share will become brilliant once you've perceive it thoroughly.

Recent experimental research in the field of neurophysiology has led to the discovery of two classes of visuomotor neurons: canonical neurons and mirror neurons. In light of these studies, we propose here an overview of two classical themes in the cognitive science panorama: James Gibson's theory of affordances and Eleanor Rosch's principles of categorization. We discuss how theoretical perspectives and neuroscientific evidence are converging towards the current paradigm of embodied cognition. From this perspective, we discuss the role of action and simulation in cognitive processes, which lead to the perceptual recognition of objects, and actions and to their conceptual categorization.

What do we see, hear or sense? Do we experience the world around us as structured and rich with meaning or do we perceive it thinly in basic sensorial properties that are grasped and interpreted non-perceptually? Questions of this kind are in the center of the debate about the contents of perceptual experience. This begs a very fundamental yet surprisingly difficult question. What is perceptual experience? How it is to be described? How do these aspects of our experience relate to cognitive processes of our mind? Where is the line drawn between these, or more generally: is there a clear line to be drawn at all?

The objective of the study is to carry out, from a psychological
perspective, an analysis of the situational probabilistic information (SPI) term in the sport domain. Specifically, a conceptual delimitation, review of studies, an interpretation of results are carried out, with interdisciplinary and critical perspective, based on cognitive and ecological psychological
approach of visual perception. The analyzed studies conclude that the athletes with higher sport level use the SPI, helping them to enhance the task performance (e.g., the processes of anticipatory actions). The contributions of the study are to assess the SPI like an information that: i) related past and present visual information (cognitive approach) or related athletes and sport context (ecological approach), ii) it is trainable, being useful in those sports that athletes must performance quick and accurate responses.

Football penalty kicks are having increasing influence in today’s professional game. Despite this, little scientific evidence currently exists to ascertain the mechanisms behind performance failure in this task and/or the efficacy of training designed to improve penalty shooting. In a football penalty kick it has been reported that the majority of kickers do not look to the area they wish to place the ball; preferring to focus on the ‘keeper and predict anticipatory movements before shooting. Such a strategy seems counterproductive and contradictory to current research findings regarding visually guided aiming. Coordination of eye and limb movements has been shown to be essential for the production of accurate motor responses. A disruption to this coordination not only seems to negatively affect performance, but subsequent motor responses seem to follow direction of gaze. Thus, where the eyes lead actions tend to follow. In study 1, ten participants were asked to kick a standard sized football to alternate corners of a goal, whilst looking centrally and whilst looking where they intended to hit. This disruption of eye-limb coordination brought about a 15% reduction in kicking accuracy. When participants were asked to fixate centrally, their shots hit more centrally (17cm) than when they were allowed to look where they intended to hit. These results were in spite of no significant differences between the number of missed shots, preparation time and ball speed data across conditions. We concluded that centrally focused fixations dragged resultant motor actions inwards towards more central target locations. Put simply, where the eyes looked shots tended to follow. The second study sought to test the predictions of attentional control theory (ACT) in a sporting environment in order to establish how anxiety affects performance in penalty kicks. Fourteen experienced footballers took penalty kicks under low- and high-threat counterbalanced conditions while wearing a gaze registration system. Fixations to target locations (goalkeeper and goal area) were determined using frame-by-frame analysis. When anxious, footballers made faster first fixations and fixated for significantly longer toward the goalkeeper. This disruption in gaze behaviour brought about significant reductions in shooting accuracy, with shots becoming significantly centralized and within the goalkeeper’s reach. These findings support the predictions of ACT, as anxious participants were more likely to focus on the “threatening” goalkeeper, owing to an increased influence of the stimulus-driven attentional control system. A further prediction of ACT is that when anxious, performers are more likely to be distracted, particularly if the distracter is threat related. When facing penalty kicks in football (soccer), goalkeepers frequently incorporate strategies that are designed to distract the kicker. However, no direct empirical evidence exists to ascertain what effect such visual distractions have on the attentional control, and performance, of footballers. In the third study, eighteen experienced footballers took five penalty kicks under counterbalanced conditions of threat (low vs. high) and goalkeeper movement (stationary vs. waving arms) while wearing eye-tracking equipment. Results suggested that participants were more distracted by a moving goalkeeper than a stationary one and struggled to disengage from a moving goalkeeper under situations of high threat. Significantly more penalties were saved on trials when the goalkeeper was moving and shots were also generally hit closer to the goalkeeper (centrally) on these trials. The results provide partial support for the predictions of attentional control theory and implications for kickers and goalkeepers are discussed. The previous studies showed that anxiety can disrupt visual attention, visuomotor control and subsequent shot location in penalty kicks. However, optimal visual attention has been trained in other far aiming skills, improving performance and resistance to pressure. In study 4, we therefore asked a team of ten university soccer players to follow a quiet eye (QE; Vickers, 1996) training program, designed to align gaze with aiming intention to optimal scoring zones, over a seven week period. Performance and gaze parameters were compared to a placebo group (ten players) who received no instruction, but practiced the same number of penalty kicks over the same time frame. Results from a retention test indicated that the QE trained group had more effective visual attentional control; were significantly more accurate; and had 50% fewer shots saved by the goalkeeper than the placebo group. Both groups then competed in a penalty shootout to explore the influence of anxiety on attentional control and shooting accuracy. Under the pressure of the shootout the QE trained group failed to maintain their accuracy advantage, despite maintaining more distal aiming fixations of longer duration. The results therefore provide only partial support for the effectiveness of brief QE training interventions for experienced performers. This series of studies are the first to explore the gaze behaviour of football penalty takers in a quest to uncover and understand anxiety’s negative influence on attentional control and performance. They are also the first to explore the efficacy of goalkeeper distractions and training in improving performance from both the goalkeeper’s and kicker’s perspective. The results of these studies conclude that when anxious, penalty takers show an attentional bias toward the ‘threatening’ goalkeeper that can be increased and utilised by a goalkeeper employing distraction techniques and that penalty takers do benefit, to some extent, from a gaze-based pre-shot routine

"In this study we examined the timing of optical information pick-up in basketball jump shooting using an intermittent viewing technique. We expected shooters to prefer to look at the basket as late as possible under the shooting style used. Seven experts with a high shooting style and five experts with a low shooting style took 50 jump shots while wearing liquid crystal glasses that opened and closed at pre-set intervals. In principle, under this constraint, the participants could control
when they saw the basket by actively modulating the timing of their movements. Analyses of the phasing of the movements relative to the events defined on the glasses revealed that low-style shooters preferred to see the basket just before the ball passed their line of sight, whereas high-style shooters tended to view the basket from underneath the ball after it passed their line of sight. Thus, most shooters preferred to pick up optical information as late as possible given the adopted shooting style. We conclude that, in dynamic far aiming tasks such as basketball jump shooting, late pick-up of optical information is critical for the successful guidance of movements."

Racism and in-group favoritism is prevalent in our society and has been studied in Social Psychology for a long time. Recently it has become possible to investigate the neural mechanisms that underlie these in-group biases, and hence this review will give an overview of recent developments on the topic. Rather than relying on a single brain region or network, it seems that subtle changes in neural activation across the brain, depending on the modalities involved, underlie how we divide the world into ‘us’ versus ‘them’.
These insights have important implications for our understanding of how in-group biases develop and could potentially lead to new insights on how to reduce them.

Three widespread assumptions about the human senses are challenged. These are that we have five senses, that they function independently, and, for the purposes of theorising perception, that vision can serve as a typical sense. These assumptions underlie most philosophical treatments of the senses in epistemology and the philosophy of perception, but they are mistaken.
Contemporary attempts to count senses generally use some combination of four criteria based on sensations, organs, stimulus and behaviour. I examine these criteria and show them to be separately insufficient and jointly incoherent. In particular, the pluralism of physical theory and difficulties with dividing primary from secondary qualities complicate counting according to stimulus, while the other criteria advise large but indefinite counts.
I consider recent proposals defending the traditional count of five based on language use, proprioceptive awareness, and pragmatic utility, and reject them all. The traditional count is best explained on the basis of differences in sensory experience, coupled with easily identified organs, together with a mistaken tendency to separate the perceiver from the world.
Rather than attempting a more critically informed count, I argue that attempts to count the senses are currently based on false presuppositions regarding the individuation of the senses. I show that the traditional sense modalities are complex and do not function separately. This is achieved by considering the sense of balance, whereby the perceiver participates in dynamical relations. Balance is implicit in all perceiving.
Assumptions that cause difficulties in counting the senses are traced to a preoccupation with vision, which is usually treated as a single sense only instrumentally controlled by the perceiver. I point out that understanding seeing has historically been a misguided effort to explain what is seen on the basis of two-dimensional retinal images and a separation of perception from action.
By noting the dependence of seeing on looking, I argue that seeing has been misrepresented in philosophical accounts of perception. What follows is that some of the important problems of epistemology have arisen from attempts to base theories of perception on a false picture of seeing. The philosophical views of Thomas Reid are used throughout to evaluate the modern debates and place them in a wider historical context.

Our understanding of Agency is, in part, the result of domain-specific learning. The nature of this domain-specific learning needs to be understood in relation to the organization of information processing in the infant. As a result of adaptive evolution, the infant is a specialized processor of information with an architecture that (in part) reflects properties of the world. On this assumption, it should be possible to establish links between properties of the world, processing subsystems specialized for tracking those properties, and domains of knowledge. It is argued in the case of Agency that three main classes of world properties are reflected in three corresponding processing subsystems producing three distinct levels of knowledge. These three related triples are, respectively, mechanical Agency, actional Agency, and attitudinal Agency.

ABSTRACT Objectives The current study investigated to what extent task-specific practice can help reduce the adverse effects of high-pressure on performance in a simulated penalty kick task. Based on the assumption that practice attenuates the required attentional resources, it was hypothesized that task-specific practice would enhance resilience against high-pressure.Method Participants practiced a simulated penalty kick in which they had to move a lever to the side opposite to the goalkeeper's dive. The goalkeeper moved at different times before ball-contact.DesignBefore and after task-specific practice, participants were tested on the same task both under low- and high-pressure conditions.ResultsBefore practice, performance of all participants worsened under high-pressure; however, whereas one group of participants merely required more time to correctly respond to the goalkeeper movement and showed a typical logistic relation between the percentage of correct responses and the time available to respond, a second group of participants showed a linear relationship between the percentage of correct responses and the time available to respond. This implies that they tended to make systematic errors for the shortest times available. Practice eliminated the debilitating effects of high-pressure in the former group, whereas in the latter group high-pressure continued to negatively affect performance.Conclusions Task-specific practice increased resilience to high-pressure. However, the effect was a function of how participants responded initially to high-pressure, that is, prior to practice. The results are discussed within the framework of attentional control theory (ACT).

The unconscious mind tends to disregard negations in its processing of semantic meaning. Therefore, messages containing negated concepts can ironically prime mental representations and evaluations that are opposite to those intended. We hypothesized that the subtle presentation of a negated concept (e.g., “no smoking”) would activate ironic motivational orientations as well. We tested this hypothesis in a public health context. Smokers viewed photographs in which no-smoking signs were either inconspicuously embedded (prime) or edited out (control). Primed smokers showed amplified automatic approach tendencies toward smoking-related stimuli, but not toward smoking-unrelated stimuli. Since passive priming effects generally serve to facilitate forms of action, not inhibit them, anti-smoking and other public health campaigns may ironically increase the very behaviors they seek to reduce.

Do abstract paintings still make sense and if so what do they mean? By reducing the paintings to simple square blots as by Cézanne, to lines as by van Gogh and color traces as by Monet their meaning is fundamentally questioned. But by interpreting these compositions as effective forces or rather affective stimuli a new and different meaning becomes apparent. Landscapes are no longer introduced but made real in the aesthetic experience. Therefore aesthetics or rather aisthetics (perception) can be defined as a notion of experience and knowledge. Thus the notion of an image gets a new understanding: it can be described as an "energetic system". - / -

Vermitteln abstrakte Bilder überhaupt noch Sinn und wenn ja, welchen? Mit der Reduzierung der Bildanlage auf einfache Flecken bei Cézanne, auf Striche bei van Gogh und schlierende Farbspuren bei Monet steht deren Bedeutung grundlegend infrage. Werden diese dagegen als Wirkungskräfte bzw. Impulskräfte aufgefasst, eröffnet sich sich ein ganz neuer, anderer Sinn. Landschaft wird nicht länger vorgestellt, sondern "realisiert" sich in der ästhetischen Erfahrung. Ästhetik bzw. Aisthetik (Wahrnehmung) erweist sich von daher als Erfahrungs- und Erkenntnisbegriff. Damit lässt sich auch der Begriff des Bildes "neu" greifen: Es lässt sich als ein "energetisches System" beschreiben.

The narrative perspective of a movie provides not only the focus of the narrative information given to the audience, but also size the mediated spatial impressions. The view through the lens
of the camera puts the viewers right into the action. The textual method of the continuous Point-of-View Shot and the numerous Reaction-Shots that are used in CLOVERFIELD (USA 2008, Matt Reeves) turn into the restricted point of view of the audience. So the closenes of the viewer to the characters is imposed by the movie. To see what the character sees can make a remarkable difference in experiencing the movie: the POV Shot supports the role-taking as a partly process of empathy, the movement of the camera becomes a somatic aspect of the emotional and intentional expressive behaviour of the characters. So the diegetic trauma becomes the visual trauma of the viewer. The camera acts of violence against the viewer and underlines the representation of violence within the movie picture.
The affective responses of the audience are central in CLOVERFIELD the dimension of the affect must be understood as dimension of response on which processes of somatic empathy
take effect. The main focus of this essay is therefore in the somatic response of the viewer and what we call somatic decoding. The somatic decoding of the cinematic code as mode of understanding the film is parallel to the decoding of cinematic violence issues. The method of POV Shots represents not only a look at the violence, but also allows the audience a high degree of participation because of the violent view of the camera: The violence in (and on) the cinematic image  becomes the violence on the viewer.

The keeper-independent strategy, in which a football penalty kicker selects a target location in advance and ignores the goalkeeper's actions during the run-up, has been suggested to be the preferable strategy for taking a penalty kick. The current in-field experiment investigated the question of whether the goalkeeper can indeed be ignored. Ten intermediate-level football players were instructed to adopt a goalkeeper-independent strategy and to perform penalty kicks directed at one of two targets located in the upper corners of the goal under three conditions: without a goalkeeper, in the presence of a goalkeeper (who tried to save the ball), and in the presence of a goalkeeper who was informed by the penalty kickers where they intended to direct the ball. The mere presence of a goalkeeper impaired shot accuracy. The shots were more centralised, that is, biased toward the goalkeeper. The effects were enhanced for the condition in which the penalty kicker knew the goalkeeper was knowledgeable about ball direction. The findings were consistent with the response activation model that holds that aiming at a target can be biased toward salient visual non-targets. The implications for adopting and practising goalkeeper-independent strategies are discussed.

El estudio de la percepción se asienta sobre unas bases, unas premisas y unos prejuicios, algunos de los cuales comentaremos e intentaremos justificar con el sesgo de nuestra perspectiva, como no podría ser de otra manera. Una primera premisa se fija en considerar la percepción como un proceso mental, un proceso cognitivo. Esa consideración tiene varias consecuencias. Una de ellas se dirige hacia la noción de lo que entendemos por mente, es decir, manejamos la noción de que la percepción se desarrolla en esa entidad ...

Gibson developed the affordance concept to complement his theory of direct perception that stands in sharp contrast with the prevalent inferential theories of perception. A comparison of the two approaches shows that the distinction between them also has an ontological aspect. We trace the history and newer formalizations of the notion of affordance and discuss some competing opinions on its scope. Next, empirical work on the affordance concept is reviewed in brief and the relevance of dynamical systems theory to affordance research is demonstrated. Finally, the striking but often neglected convergence of the ideas of Gibson and those of certain Continental philosophers is discussed.

The present text is a very abridged version of a book I wrote out of the desire to examine the structure of our reality from a standpoint unbiased by established teachings, be they
academic- scientific, popular- esoteric, or religious in nature.1 We will begin with seemingly simple interactions in our daily lives, examine how they originate on a deeper level, come to
understand the essentials of consciousness, and finally recognize that we create our reality in its entirety. In the course of this quest, we will uncover little-heeded paths to accessing
our subconscious, other individuals, and that which can be understood by the term "God". And the solution to the classical problem of free will constitutes the gist of the concepts thus
revealed.

Anxiety has been shown to disrupt visual attention, visuomotor control and subsequent shot location in soccer penalty kicks. However, optimal visual attention has been trained in other far aiming skills, improving performance and resistance to pressure. We therefore asked a team of ten university soccer players to follow a quiet eye (QE; Vickers, 1996) training program, designed to align gaze with aiming intention to optimal scoring zones, over a seven week period. Performance and gaze parameters were compared to a placebo group (ten players) who received no instruction, but practiced the same number of penalty kicks over the same time frame. Results from a retention test indicated that the QE trained group had more effective visual attentional control; were significantly more accurate; and had 50% fewer shots saved by the goalkeeper than the placebo group. Both groups then competed in a penalty shootout to explore the influence of anxiety on attentional control and shooting accuracy. Under the pressure of the shootout the QE trained group failed to maintain their accuracy advantage, despite maintaining more distal aiming fixations of longer duration. The results therefore provide only partial support for the effectiveness of brief QE training interventions for experienced performers.

Current theoretical and empirical thought suggests that successful performance of goal-directed movements require an integration of perceptual, cognitive, and motor processes (1,2).  For example, to successfully navigate a crowded room, individuals must detect relevant sensory information (the distance between other people and objects), integrate that information, plan an appropriate motor response, and then efficiently execute that response (walk without collision).  The act of movement generates a dynamic interchange amongst the three systems:  Movement yields feedback from different sensory organs (visual, vestibular, subcutaneous, etc.), and this new information must be integrated and upgraded until the individual completes the movement.  Both development and experience generate tighter coupling of perception, cognition, and action, leading to less variability in performance and increased efficiency of movements, which adequately support actions that are more skilled.  For children Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), one or several processes may be deficient along the sequence from perception to action.  This may generate persistent variability and challenge ideal motor performance for success in daily activities.  Although the body of research is relatively small, researchers whose studies examine motor functioning in children with ASD generally conclude that motor deficiencies exist across a range of skills, including fine and gross motor domains such as posture, balance, and locomotion (3,4).  However, there remains a question related to the nature of these impairments:  Where within the process of perception-cognition-action coupling do children with ASD differ from typically developing children?  The purpose of this chapter is to review both theory and research related to the process of perception-cognition-action coupling in children with ASD in an attempt to direct future research.  The discussion is framed within an ecological perspective.

Embodied/Enactive Cognition erfordert es, die ästhetische Erfahrung neu zu denken. Analysiert man den Beobachtungs-Prozess selbst, wird die aktive Konstruktion jeder Gestalt erkennbar. Aisthesis als kognitive Modellbildung dient somit der Selbst- und Welterschließung. Ein Action-Perception-Cycle ermöglicht durch „epistemische Handlungen“ (die auch unbewusst/verkörpert sein können) die Prognose von Handlungseffekten. Die Entwicklung von Hypothesen zu wahrscheinlichen Wirkungen (Forward Modelling) und möglichen Ursachen (Inverse Modelling) bilden so den Kern der Wirklichkeits-Konstruktion. Dabei kann es sich um gelingende oder misslingende Prozesse der kognitiven Modellbildung handeln. Im ersten Schritt wird der Basis-Mechanismus jeder ästhetischen Erfahrung formuliert. Dieser wird evolutionär als Lern-Verstärker interpretiert und ist evolutionär, neurobiologisch sowie lebensweltlich plausibel. Hiermit lassen sich positive ästhetische Erfahrungen präzise erklären – und bei Umkehrung der Prozessrichtung auch negative ästhetische Erfahrungen. Soll dieser Mechanismus als notwendige und hinreichende Bedingung fungieren, stellt sich die Frage: Warum empfinden dann nicht alle Menschen gleich? Im zweiten Schritt wird aus dem Basis-Prozess durch Iteration und Rekursion der Möglichkeitsraum ästhetischer Erfahrung und ein erweitertes Prozess-Modell abgeleitet. Es zeigt sich, dass konkurrierende Präferenz-Stile als Teilmengen dieses Möglichkeitsraumes zu verstehen sind. Meta-ästhetisch betrachtet ist selbst die Vorliebe für eine bestimmte (Bereichs-)Ästhetik ein solcher Präferenz-Stil, der als Mittel zu einem Zweck bestimmbar ist.