A Study on the Perceptual and Motor Bases of Prediction

INTRODUCTION Many are the circumstances in which action–perception dissociations have been observed (e.g. [1], [2]). Among the best known cases there are the pictorial illusions which induce errors in perception but cannot deceive a motor act. It is not yet clear however in which other conditions this separation could be noticed [3]. Following the work of Dubrowski [4] and Zago [5] we wanted to investigate whether action-perception dissociations affect also prediction. We performed an experiment to evaluate whether prediction is differently realized when it’s aimed at driving a motor act and when instead its purpose is “perceptual-only”. In particular we focused on how dynamical information of target motion is used depending on prediction goal. In a previous experiment (an interception task) we observed that predictive performances where significantly better when the target maintained unvaried its dynamic features (i.e. the force field that drove its motion). Furthermore, when the target was driven by a force field similar to gravity interception resulted easier. We wanted to check if the same results could be found in a predictive task in which no motion was involved.