Living in a material world: how visual cues to material properties affect the way that we lift objects and perceive their weight.

Living in a Material World: How Visual Cues to Material Properties Affect the Way That We Lift Objects and Perceive Their Weight 2 Group on Action and Perception

The impact of unilateral brain damage on weight perception, sensorimotor anticipation, and fingertip force adaptation

Damage to the left parietal cortex can lead to apraxia - a selective deficit in tool use and action planning. There is conflicting evidence as to whether this disorder affects more fundamental motor parameters, such as applying the appropriate forces to lift objects based upon how heavy they look. Here we examined how individuals with left and right-lateralized brain damage lift and perceive th...

Size Matters: A Single Representation Underlies Our Perceptions of Heaviness in the Size-Weight Illusion

In the size-weight illusion (SWI), a small object feels heavier than an equally-weighted larger object. It is thought that this illusion is a consequence of the way that we internally represent objects' properties--lifters expect one object to outweigh the other, and the subsequent illusion reflects a contrast with their expectations. Similar internal representations are also thought to guide t...

Material evidence: interaction of well-learned priors and sensorimotor memory when lifting objects.

Skilled object lifting requires the prediction of object weight. When lifting new objects, such prediction is based on well-learned size-weight and material-density correlations, or priors. However, if the prediction is erroneous, people quickly learn the weight of the particular object and can use this knowledge, referred to as sensorimotor memory, when lifting the object again. In the present...

Effects of surface reflectance and 3D shape on perceived rotation axis.

Surface specularity distorts the optic flow generated by a moving object in a way that provides important cues for identifying surface material properties (Doerschner, Fleming et al., 2011). Here we show that specular flow can also affect the perceived rotation axis of objects. In three experiments, we investigate how three-dimensional shape and surface material interact to affect the perceived...