Explicit effort may not influence perceptuomotor decision-making.

Many decisions that humans make are enacted by the action system. For example, humans use reach-to-grasp movements when making perceptuomotor decisions between and obtaining fruits of varying quality from a pile. Recent work suggests that the characteristics of each action alternative may influence the decision itself-there may be a bias away from making perceptuomotor alternatives associated with high effort when participants are unaware of the effort differences between responses.

Modulation of response activation leads to biases in perceptuomotor decision making.

Humans are constantly enacting motor responses based on perceptual judgments or decisions. Recent work suggests that accumulating evidence for a decision and planning the action to enact the decision are coupled. Further, decision commitment may occur when the action reaches its motor threshold.

Choices in a key press decision-making task are more optimal after gaining both aiming and reward experience.

When presented with two different target-penalty configurations of similar maximum expected gain (MEG), participants prefer aiming to configurations with more advantageous spatial, rather than more advantageous gain parameters-perhaps due to the motor system's inherent prioritisation of spatial information during movements with high accuracy demands such as aiming. To test this hypothesis, participants in the present studies chose between target-penalty configurations via key presses to reduce the importance of spatial parameters of the response and performance-related feedback. Configurations varied in spatial (target-penalty region overlap) and gain parameters (negative penalty values) and could have similar or different MEG.

The impact of athletic clothing style and body awareness on motor performance in women.

The type of clothing worn, revealing versus concealing, can affect the performance of women on cognitive tasks. This difference in performance may arise because of changes in body awareness that may draw cognitive resources from the goal task. The present study investigated the influence of the style of athletic clothing and body awareness on visual-motor performance in women.

Cueing effects emerge when humans (Homo sapiens) view images of mammals (mammalia) and birds (aves).

Humans use eye- and head-gaze cues to facilitate social interactions among members of their own species. Research examining nonhuman animal-to-human cueing effects has received little attention, but may provide valuable insight into the mechanisms that have enabled species to coexist and thrive in shared environments. The objective of the current studies was to determine how gaze cues influence the attention and target detection of humans when they view images of mammals (human, orangutan, and dog; Experiment 1) and aves (owl, macaw parrot, and duck; Experiment 2).

Goal-directed reaching: the allocentric coding of target location renders an offline mode of control.

Reaching to a veridical target permits an egocentric spatial code (i.e., absolute limb and target position) to effect fast and effective online trajectory corrections supported via the visuomotor networks of the dorsal visual pathway.

Vision for action and perception elicit dissociable adherence to Weber's law across a range of 'graspable' target objects.

A number of studies have reported that grasps and manual estimations of differently sized target objects (e.g., 20 through 70 mm) violate and adhere to Weber's law, respectively (e.

Manual estimations of functionally graspable target objects adhere to Weber's law.

The manual estimation task requires that participants separate the distance between their thumb and forefinger until they perceive it to match the size of a target object. Ganel and colleagues (Curr Biol 18:R599-R601, 2008a) demonstrated that manual estimations yield just-noticeable-difference (JND) scores that linearly increased with increasing target object size; that is, responses adhered to Weber's law and thus evince response mediation via relative and perception-based visual information. In turn, more recent work has reported that the size of a target object influences whether JNDs provide a reliable metric for evaluating the nature of the visual information supporting manual estimations.

Biomechanical constraints do not influence pantomime-grasping adherence to Weber's law: A reply to Utz et al. (2015).

Work by our group and others employed the within-participants variability in peak grip aperture as a 'just-noticeable-difference' (JND) in grasping. Notably, our group reported that grasping responses with decoupled spatial relations between stimulus and response (i.e.

Response-specific effects in a joint action task: social inhibition of return effects do not emerge when observed and executed actions are different.

Although the inhibition of return (IOR) effect is primarily studied when people act individually, IOR is also observed in social environments where a person observes a partner's response before executing their own response (social or sIOR). Specifically, an observer takes longer to initiate a response to a target at a location that another individual has just responded to than to another location. The present study was conducted to determine if sIOR emerges when two individuals execute different actions-one participant executed keypress responses and the other completed aiming movements to the same set of stimuli.

Knowledge of response location alone is not sufficient to generate social inhibition of return.

Previous research has revealed that the inhibition of return (IOR) effect emerges when individuals respond to a target at the same location as their own previous response or the previous response of a co-actor. The latter social IOR effect is thought to occur because the observation of co-actor's response evokes a representation of that action in the observer and that the observation-evoked response code subsequently activates the inhibitory mechanisms underlying IOR. The present study was conducted to determine if knowledge of the co-actor's response alone is sufficient to evoke social IOR.