ABSTRACT
People have always been fascinated by the human hand and the exquisite precision of its movements. When hand meets objects we confront the overlapping worlds of sensorimotor and cognitive functions. We reach for objects, grasp and lift them, manipulate them and use them to act on another object. Prehension is the key behavior that allows humans to interact with their environment and it serves as a remarkable experimental test case for probing the cognitive architecture of goal-oriented action. This chapter examines the experimental evidence that conceptualize the “cognitive” substrates of prehension.
