Ideomotor Control of Anticipatory Action

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Oliver Herbort
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2013 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 233554795

We interact with many different objects every day. Even though we usually do not pay much heed to these actions, they are indeed stunning demonstrations of the capabilities of the human brain. They require the integration of knowledge about objects, our own action capabilities, and the relationship between the two. The sophistication of every-day object manipulations is already revealed in how we grasp objects before we interact with them, because we usually select grasps that bring our bodies into initial postures that are specifically tailored to facilitate the intended object manipulations.In recent decades, the topic of how we select grasps for object manipulations has received considerable attention. Whereas we now understand rather well how we benefit from our grasp selections, we have a very limited understanding of the motor-cognitive processes that enable this form of adaptive behavior in the first place. The preceding project (HE 6710/2-1) revealed that two aspects of the grasp selection process are crucial: learning processes and task representations. As these processes have received little attention so far in this context, we want to shed light on them with the proposed continuation proposal.As ideomotor theory emphasizes these aspects, we test whether it can be used to better understand grasp selection for object manipulation. Ideomotor theory explains the acquisition and control of goal-directed behavior in very general terms. According to ideomotor theory, actions are initiated by anticipating their sensory effects. These effect representation have become connected with specific actions by prior associative learning of action-effect links. Specifically, we want to test whether grasps are selected for specific object manipulations by anticipating the expected perceptual features of object movements. The proposed project has three parts. In part I, we want to test whether grasp selection for object manipulation is affected by previous associations of grasps with object manipulations. In part II, we want to examine whether representations of object manipulations affect grasp selections. In part III, we want to examine whether decisions for object manipulations are based on the perceptual complexity of the involved object movement. In summary, we expect that this project deepens our understanding of human object manipulation capabilities and that it extents ideomotor theory to more complex, biomechanically demanding actions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants