Constituents of action evoked by language and perception.

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A widely held view is that the image of a manipulable object can automatically trigger constituents of grasp actions. Motor representations are likewise evoked by a word or a sentence denoting an action, lending credence to the idea that actions are tacitly emulated during language comprehension. How valid are these claims? If true, then what is the role of motor intentions in the selection of action features when we view graspable objects or attend to a sentence like “use the spraycan”? Are intended actions merely selected from already active visuomotor representations? Over the next five years, my research program will establish that intentions themselves play a fundamental role in evoking the motor constituents of objects and words. The longer term goal is to shed light on the relationship between perception, language and action. Section 1 of this proposal describes a set of experiments that rigorously pursues the following question: Under what task conditions, if any, do images of manipulable objects trigger constituents of grasp actions? Section 2 evaluates the claim that the motor features of the actions based on the meaning of a declarative sentence are triggered during comprehension. A novel, alternative hypothesis will be pursued which evaluates the nature of these motor representations in more detail, and calls this assumption into question. A third issue is the following. An object like a cellphone affords different actions depending on whether the intention is to use or lift it. If goal-directed actions are merely selected from already existing visuomotor representations, the meaning of an imperative sentence like “Pick up the cellphone” should potentiate a lift rather than use action (and vice versa), even in the absence of an intention to act. In Section 3, I develop a novel series of experiments that will shed light on the nature of actions induced by an imperative sentence depending on whether the listener (i) simply attends to the meaning; (ii) intends to act on the meaning directly or (iii) intends to postpone the action momentarily while carrying out another action on the same or different object. Does the meaning select an action from a set of competing affordances potentiated by a designated object? Or, do motor intentions play a fundamental role in the selection of actions? It will be established that the activation and selection of motor representations evoked by an imperative sentence fundamentally depend on the listener's intentions. My research will deepen our understanding of motor representations triggered by objects and sentences under different task conditions.