The costs of action Comment on 'Action semantics: A unifying conceptual framework for the selective use of multimodal and modality-specific object knowledge' by Michiel van Elk, Hein van Schie and Harold Bekkering

摘要

van Elk and colleagues [1] offer a wonderful and current review of a large and growing literature, as well as a framework for organizing potentially conflicting findings. The authors propose 4 modality-specific components, yet more are needed for a complete framework. In particular, many tasks reviewed involve simple actions that come at little-to-no cost to the actor. But in real life, many actions have outcomes other than those associated with proprioceptive and sensory consequences. For instance, actions such as walking are associated with energetic costs, especially when these actions involve ascending hills or carrying heavy loads such as a backpack. Other actions such as carrying or throwing a heavy object also incur energetic costs. These energetic costs, or consequences, factor into how people perceive the spatial layout of the environment [2,6,9,12,14] and into decisions about which actions to perform [3,10,11]. Given these influences of energetic costs, interoceptive consequences should also be included in the action semantics hierarchical framework [16].