Editorial: Action effects in perception and action

摘要

Good scientific theories should be simple, valid, and stimulating. It seems that ideomotor theory, which has been the core theme behind the research topic on “Action Effects in Perception and Action,” has done a fairly good job in terms of these three criteria. First, it is rather simple: goal-directed actions are assumed to be selected and addressed by anticipating their sensory consequences; crucially, learned bidirectional associations between sensory representations and motor commands ensure that these anticipations eventually result in overt behavior. Secondly, numerous observations comply with its basic predictions, derived from philosophical analyses of the nineteenth century (cf. Stock and Stock, 2004; Pfister and Janczyk, 2012). Accordingly, the validity of ideomotor theory has been documented by extensive empirical research over the last decades (e.g., Elsner and Hommel, 2001; Hommel et al., 2001; Kunde, 2001; see also Shin et al., 2010).