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Assimilation and contrast: the two sides of specific interference between action and perception

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Abstract

Perception and action have long been treated as relatively independent and serial processes. More recent views, however, consider perception and action as relying on a common set of processes and/or representations. The present paper will focus on a variety of specific (content-based) perception–action interactions that have been taken as support for such views. In particular, the following aspects will be considered: direction of influence (perception on action vs. action on perception), temporal type (concurrent vs. non-concurrent), functional relation (related/unrelated), and type of movements (biological vs. non-biological). Different extant models of the perception-action interface are discussed and a classification schema proposed that tries to explain when contrast and when assimilation effects will arise.

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Notes

  1. Attraction was found to far away distractors. This pattern was explained within a competitive model and is consistent with the current account, assuming that distance controls amount of overlap (see Zwickel et al. 2010a).

  2. We thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

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Acknowledgments

Part of this work has been published as the dissertation of the first author. We are very grateful to Marc Grosjean for invaluable discussions and to Rosie Wallis for help with the language.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

    Jan Zwickel & Wolfgang Prinz

  2. Department of Psychology, LMU Munich, Munich, Germany

    Jan Zwickel

  3. Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, USA

    Jan Zwickel

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  1. Jan Zwickel
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Correspondence to Jan Zwickel.

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Zwickel, J., Prinz, W. Assimilation and contrast: the two sides of specific interference between action and perception. Psychological Research 76, 171–182 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-011-0338-3

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