Bringing action into the picture. How action influences visual awareness

This article discusses how the analysis of interactions between action and awareness allows us to better understand the mechanisms of visual awareness. We argue that action is one of several factors that influence visual awareness and we provide a number of examples. We also discuss the possible mec...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAttention, perception & psychophysics Vol. 81; no. 7; pp. 2171 - 2176
Main Authors Anzulewicz, Anna, Hobot, Justyna, Siedlecka, Marta, Wierzchoń, Michał
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Austin Springer Nature B.V 01.10.2019
Subjects
Consciousness
Discrimination Learning
Evidence
Feedback (Response)
Influence
Information Processing
Ratings & rankings
Transcranial magnetic stimulation
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Summary:This article discusses how the analysis of interactions between action and awareness allows us to better understand the mechanisms of visual awareness. We argue that action is one of several factors that influence visual awareness and we provide a number of examples. We also discuss the possible mechanisms that underlie these influences on both the cognitive and the neural levels. We propose that action affects visual awareness for the following reasons: (1) it serves as additional information in the process of evidence accumulation; (2) it restricts the number of alternatives in the decisional process; (3) it enables error detection and performance monitoring; and (4) it triggers attentional mechanisms that modify stimulus perception. We also discuss the possible neuronal mechanisms of the aforementioned effects, including feedback-dependent prefrontal cortex modulation of the activity of visual areas, error-based modulation, interhemispheric inhibition of motor cortices, and attentional modulation of visual cortex activity triggered by motor processing.
ISSN:1943-3921
1943-393X
DOI:10.3758/sl3414-019-01781-w