How You Move Is What You See: Action Planning Biases Selection in Visual Search

Three experiments investigated the impact of planning and preparing a manual grasping or pointing movement on feature detection in a visual search task. The authors hypothesized that action planning may prime perceptual dimensions that provide information for the open parameters of that action. Indeed, preparing for grasping facilitated detection of size targets while preparing for pointing facilitated detection of luminance targets. Following the Theory of Event Coding (Hommel, Musseler, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2001b), the authors suggest that perceptual dimensions may be intentionally weighted with respect to an intended action. More interesting, the action-related influences were observed only when participants searched for a predefined target. This implies that action-related weighting is not independent from task-relevance weighting. To account for our findings, the authors suggest an integrative model of visual search that incorporates input from action-planning processes.