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Cognitive neuroscienceThe Neural Mind
Contents and reading path

Chapter 2

Sensation, Perception and Action

  1. 2.1How does the world become an experience?
  2. 2.2From stimulation to nerve signals
  3. 2.3Vision and visual perception
  4. 2.4Hearing and the direction of sound
  5. 2.5When the senses work together
  6. 2.6The cup in a noisy café
  7. 2.7How does a movement take shape?
  8. 2.8Prediction, feedback and learning
  9. LabThe visual lab

Perception and motor learning – in preparation

Reading path
Coming chapters (planned content)
  1. 1. Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience
  2. 3. Attention
  3. 4. Memory and Learning
  4. 5. Language
  5. 6. Thinking and Executive Functions
  6. 7. Decision-Making
  7. 8. Emotion and Motivation
  8. 9. Social Cognition
  9. 10. Metacognition and Consciousness

Chapter 2 · Section 6

The cup in a noisy café

Back to the cup – but now in a noisy café, where you must detect, localise, recognise and act.

Back to the cup – but now in a café. Crockery clatters, someone is talking behind you and light falls in from the window. You need to detect the cup, localise it in relation to your hand and recognise it as yours. These functions can run in parallel and affect each other. Visual impressions, the clink when the cup is put down and the feel of the handle are clues that are processed in parallel and that the nervous system can combine when they belong together.

When you act, the situation changes: the hand moves into the visual field, you feel the surface of the porcelain, the cup weighs more or less than you expected. The new information updates the next step through feedback. Perception and action thus form a loop rather than a straight line.

Perception and action as a loopOn the left a box Sensory information with three cues: vision – the cup's shape and position, hearing – the clink of porcelain, touch – the surface of the handle. An arrow leads to a group labelled Interacting perceptual functions, where detect, localise and recognise stand side by side with no arrows between them, with the text run in parallel and influence each other. An arrow leads to Action. From action an arrow goes down to Changed sensory information, and a dashed arrow labelled feedback leads back to Sensory information.Sensory informationVision: the cup's shape, positionHearing: the clink of porcelainTouch: the surface of the handleInteracting perceptualfunctionsDetectLocaliseRecogniserun in parallel, influence each otherActionChangedsensory informationthe hand moves,the cup is touchedfeedbackThe arrows show the logic of the idea, not measured connections.
Figure 2.7. Perception and action as a loop. Sensory information from vision, hearing and touch contributes to cooperating perceptual functions – detecting, localising and recognising – that run in parallel and guide the action. The action changes the sensory information, and the change is fed back. The arrows show the logic of the idea, not measured connections.Original schematic illustration.

The next question is how movements are planned, controlled and learned. The following sections introduce motor control, prediction and feedback; a fuller path on perception and motor learning is in preparation.

Feel free to review the chapter's key terms or return to the contrast experiment in section 2.1 and consider what you can now say about it.

Sources for this section
  • Scientific referenceSaunders, J. A. & Knill, D. C. (2003). Humans use continuous visual feedback from the hand to control fast reaching movements. Experimental Brain Research, 152(3), 341–352. DOI: 10.1007/s00221-003-1525-2.Visual feedback from the hand during fast reaching movements. Open the source ↗ (new tab)
  • Figure provenance and model limitations are described on the sources page. About sources and figures