Zekun Sun¹ (), Samuel D. McDougle^1,2; ¹Department of Psychology, Yale University, ²Wu Tsai Institute, Yale University

Perception often precedes action — we see, we think, and then we act. Yet the reverse can also be true: Action may enhance what we perceive. For example, children learn about the visual world by moving their bodies and interacting with their surroundings; and, when we touch an object, haptic input can activate a related visual image. If action scaffolds perception in a more direct way, then performing a dynamic movement might activate the visual structure it implies. Here, we ask whether a temporally unfolding motor trajectory can activate a corresponding spatial representation in vision, thereby improving recognition of the motor-implied pattern. In our experiment, participants first moved their hand to track a disc that moves along the trajectory of a novel character. Immediately afterward, they viewed a static noise image and indicated via key press whether it contained only noise or a hidden character. Tracking performance was quantified using the Procrustes distance between participants’ hand movements and the target’s trajectory. Across 43 participants, tracking performance significantly predicted recognition accuracy (p < .01): Participants who more precisely reproduced the trajectory were more likely to detect the character within noise. This relationship appeared to vanish when participants tracked one character but attempted to recognize a different character, ruling out nonspecific performance factors. These findings point to a novel “motor-visual priming” effect, in which dynamic movements may facilitate subsequent visual detection by activating a shared, cross-modal spatial representation.

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by grant R01 NS134754 (S.D.M.) from the National Institutes of Health