Target interception in virtual reality is better for natural versus unnatural trajectory shapes and orientations.

Human performance in perceptual and visuomotor tasks is enhanced when stimulus motion follows the laws of gravitational physics, including acceleration consistent with Earth's gravity, g. Here we used a manual interception task in virtual reality to investigate the effects of trajectory shape and orientation on interception timing and accuracy. Participants punched to intercept a ball moving along one of four trajectories that varied in shape (parabola or tent) and orientation (upright or inverted).

Viewpoint adaptation revealed potential representational differences between 2D images and 3D objects.

For convenience and experimental control, cognitive science has relied largely on images as stimuli rather than the real, tangible objects encountered in the real world. Recent evidence suggests that the cognitive processing of images may differ from real objects, especially in the processing of spatial locations and actions, thought to be mediated by the dorsal visual stream. Perceptual and semantic processing in the ventral visual stream, however, has been assumed to be largely unaffected by the realism of objects.

Shared representations of human actions across vision and language.

Humans can recognize and communicate about many actions performed by others. How are actions organized in the mind, and is this organization shared across vision and language? We collected similarity judgments of human actions depicted through naturalistic videos and sentences, and tested four models of action categorization, defining actions at different levels of abstraction ranging from specific (action verb) to broad (action target: whether an action is directed towards an object, another person, or the self). The similarity judgments reflected a shared organization of action representations across videos and sentences, determined mainly by the target of actions, even after accounting for other semantic features.

Distinct Neural Components of Visually Guided Grasping during Planning and Execution.

Selecting suitable grasps on three-dimensional objects is a challenging visuomotor computation, which involves combining information about an object (e.g., its shape, size, and mass) with information about the actor's body (e.