Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper, we argue that action is involved in the creation and representation of perceptual objects. We introduce leading philosophical theories regarding the structure of perceptual objects in modality-independent and multisensory settings. These accounts omit action as a causal factor that can facilitate feature binding and serve as a structural component of perceptual objects. We argue that action does play this causal role due to the connections between the brain's motor system and perceptual processing as evidenced by neurophysiological and behavioral studies. These data include research on view-independent representations, peripersonal space, and event file coding. We conclude that to omit the influence of the motor system on the structure of perceptual objects is to have an incomplete account of object perception. Motor action is often required to drive the integration of sensory features into corresponding perceptual objects.