ABSTRACT
Imagine yourself picking up little stones during a relaxing walk on the seaside. Although pretty much effortless, grasping of a pebble on a sandy beach is quite a feat from the point of view of the neural processing involved. After all, even during such a simple visuomotor task the brain has to localize and identify the desired target, then align sensory information on the location and shape of the object with the initial position of the acting limb in order to generate specific motor programs encoding distance and direction, the required orientation and velocity of the arm, the proper positioning and preshaping of the hand, as well as opposing forces of the fingers to be applied at the object’s center of mass (Goodale et al. 1991, 1994; Jakobson and Goodale 1991; Sakata et al. 1995). No matter how complex this processing might seem, however, the task is still quite trivial as the requirements for target selection are minimal in this case, and the object does not have any particular functional properties to be taken into account during action programming and execution. In fact, it stands to reason that a simple reach-to-grasp movement of this kind could
CONTENTS
4.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 69 4.2 Visual Processing and Perception .....................................................................................72
