ABSTRACT
Successful actions require guidance from our sensory systems. For this reason, perception and action are strongly intertwined. The present chapter starts with a discussion of Gibson's classic direct perception theory and introduces the concept of affordances. Following a brief introduction of motion perception, the chapter continues to discuss how visual motion signals might be used to guide reaching and grasping behaviour. To do so, the concept of perception-action cycles is introduced, along with a discussion of the main neural correlates of these cycles. A large section of the chapter focuses on visually guided action, focusing on the contributions of optimal feedback control, eye and head movements, and the transfer between egocentric and allocentric coordinate systems. The final sections of the chapter focus on the somewhat more practical challenges of viewing behaviour during driving tasks, before closing the chapter with a discussion of the role of attention (specifically the premotor theory of attention) in visually guided behaviour and the impact of visual and attentional remapping during saccadic eye movements.
