Leaders: Rick van der Zwan and Kate Stevens

Evidence accumulates that perception and action are linked. The process of producing actions and reading actions by others is one of neural mirroring or simulation. Despite the coupling of perception and action in humans, perception and action are often considered as separate domains of research. Similarly, many machine systems have been designed for either perception or production, e.g., automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, computer vision. As technology advances multimodal systems capable of both perception and production are on the increase. How can knowledge emerging on the area of perception-action and motor simulation inform and enhance new multimodal technologies such as avatars, personal assistants, and embodied conversational agents? For example, can motor simulation be modeled? Can systems be programmed to develop expectancies and to anticipate actions and responses?

The way that humans attend to particular information from the wide array available, and use this information to guide and direct action, is not only of theoretical and practical interest for studies on human behaviour and human movement, but also for human studies of when such behaviours go awry in such conditions as motor disorders, and studies of machine-based learning and robotics.

No one discipline will solve these complex problems - an integrated interdisciplinary approach is required, which might include input from a range of areas, e.g., visual and auditory perception, motor control, motor learning, cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistics, sign language, gesture analysis, non-verbal communication, music perception and performance, computer science, and signal processing.

Events

• HCSNet Workshop on Speech, Perception and Action 10-11 July, 2008

Past Events

• Perception and Action Symposium 2007 3rd July, 2007

Perception and Action Prizes

The Perception and Action (P&A) Priority Area has set itself the aim, in 2007, of establishing functional research collaborations across researchers working in different disciplines and in different institutions.

With a view to fostering both collaborative research and junior researchers the P&A network will be supporting two awards in 2007:

1. Human Communication Science: Perception and Action prize for
Best Refereed Publication by a Postgraduate Student Researcher

2. Human Communication Science: Perception and Action prize for
Best Refereed Publication from a Cross-Institutional or Cross-Disciplined Group of Researchers

Each award will attract a prize of $500 to support research or conference travel. Award winners will receive some support for attending SummerFest 2007.

A call will be made, in October, for nominations for each of the awards. That call will outline the assessment criteria for each award.

Submissions will be judged by a panel of experienced researchers who reserve the right not to award either prize should there be no nominations of appropriate quality.

Presentations of the awards will be made at SummerFest 2007.