Decomposing the action effect: How simple actions affect subsequent perception

Simple actions toward an object cause people to allocate attention preferentially toward properties of that object in subsequent unrelated tasks. We show here that it is not necessary to process or attend to any properties of the object in order to obtain the effect: Even when participants knew prior to the object’s onset that they would be acting, the effects of the object remained. Furthermore, the effect remained when the action had no visible effect on the object. In addition, we examined the extent to which the effect may be due to goal updating (which is necessary only on trials that require action) and found that the effect remained even when goal updating was not necessary. The results reveal that a simple action does, indeed, affect perception and have implications for understanding vision as individuals make actions in naturally occurring behavior.