A new window into the interactions between perception and action

Traditionally, viewing window paradigms have been used to evaluate perceptual features useful in object identification. Participants are presented with a degraded picture of an object on a computer monitor and are asked to identify the object as quickly as possible. A small, user controlled area (the "window") displays the underlying image with normal clarity. Despite their traditional role, viewing window tasks require visuomotor processing, which can be manipulated to illuminate the interactions between the "perception" and "action" based cortical visual streams. As participants performed the present experiment, response times and movement of the window were recorded. The participant's movement of the window was analyzed (the visuomotor scanning pattern), separating the image into four equal sized quadrants and then examining the percentage of time spent in each. A main-effect of quadrant was found, demonstrating the ability of this procedure to identify vertical and horizontal asymmetries in visuomotor scan patterns elicited by the presented objects. This research demonstrates the feasibility of the viewing window as a method of examining the interactions between perceptual and motor information. Importantly, results indicate that the viewing window procedure has the ability discriminate any gross asymmetries in a participant's visuomotor scanpath used to identify these common objects.