15:30 - 17:00
Mon—Casino_1.811—Poster1—24
Mon-Poster1
Room:
Room: Casino_1.811
Action without visual awareness: an experimental examination into the role of visual awareness and visual attention for the control of visually guided action
Mon—Casino_1.811—Poster1—2406
Presented by: Didem Taskiran
Didem Taskiran *Frederic GöhringerThomas Schenk
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Motor movements often require corrections, some of which may be triggered by environmental changes that we are not perceptually aware of. In their study, Goodale et al. (1986) demonstrated that despite being unaware of the changes in target position during saccadic eye movements, participants pointing movements adjusted to account for those changes. This implies a robust visuomotor system operating independently of conscious awareness and cognitive resources. The current study aims to test these implications, by examining the performance of the visuomotor system under single-task and dual-task conditions. In order to achieve this, participants undergo pointing tasks with gaze-contingent target shifts, combined with an auditory n-back task, while their hand and eye movements are recorded. Since secondary tasks are known to impair performance on primary tasks, namely the dual-task interference, we test whether saccadic and corrective pointing movements to unperceived target shifts are resistant to such interference. Hand and eye movement metrics, such as pointing and saccade accuracy, along with n-back performance, are compared across conditions. A separate two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) task evaluates participants’ perceptual awareness to gaze-contingent target shifts, enabling analysis of its relationship with corrective movements. This approach aims to determine whether motor corrections rely on central cognitive resources and to clarify the role of perceptual processes in these adjustments.
Keywords: Motor control, Visual perception, Multitasking, Perception-Action Model, Dorsal stream, Ventral stream