PERCERA

The project raises the general issue of the interrelations between perception, action, and cognition, which are viewed as a source of change. If the way people perceive and represent their environment depends on their own action repertoire, then changes in the action repertoire will entail modifications in the perception and representation of the environment. Research on action planning indicates that multiple action representations guide the execution of goal-directed actions and that competition between action representations affects action performance. In addition, similar processes underlie the actual execution of goal-directed actions on the one hand, and the perception of actions and the perception of manipulable objects on the other hand. Thus, we hypothesize that competition between action representations also affects object and action perception. Moreover, the recruitment and monitoring of action representations may evolve during lifespan development and change at a given age under the pressure of contextual and social factors. Consequently, the present project aims at identifying the mechanisms underlying competition between action representations during the perception of objects and object-directed actions. It further seeks to highlight the changes in perceptual processing that can be caused by developmental and contextual modifications in action processing. The project considers a multi-level model of action representations and focus on three specific aims. Each aim combines the questions and methods of cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, social psychology, and neurosciences through the complementary expertise of four young researchers situated in Northern France. The first aim is to investigate the developmental, contextual, and social changes in the evocation and monitoring of gesture-level representations during object perception. Preliminary data indicate that perception of objects associated with conflicting structural and functional gestures entails a processing cost. In three behavioral studies, we will assess how this cost evolves during life span (childhood, adulthood, elderly), and how it can be moderated by object visual presentation and social variables (e.g. power). Object perception will be examined using a recently developed paradigm in virtual reality. The second aim is to test the hierarchical organization of action representations and specify how and when gesture-level and intention-level action representations participate in action understanding. In four studies, we will identify the temporal dynamics of action decoding at the behavioral and neural levels and further assess how the visual and social contexts modify those temporal dynamics. Action pictures containing gesture or intention violations have been designed to examine this issue. The third aim is to identify the neural markers of conflict between competing action representations in perception using electroencephalography. One study will focus on the conflict between competing gestures during object perception (cf. aim 1) and a second study will focus on the conflict between incongruent gesture and intention during action perception (cf. aim 2). At the scientific level, findings will fuel theoretical models on perception, action semantics, and embodied cognition. They will further help determining specific periods of the life span during which perception is most affected by competing action representations and identifying factors that can reduce the cost of competition between action representations. At the societal level, findings will have an important impact in the domains of education, neurological rehabilitation, and technological innovations related to image creation and diffusion.