Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society The interaction of attention and action: From seeing action to acting on perception Glyn W. Humphreys*, Eun Young Yoon, Sanjay Kumar, Vaia Lestou, Keiko Kitadono, Katherine L. Roberts and M. Jane Riddoch Behavioural Brain Sciences, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, UK We discuss evidence indicating that human visual attention is strongly modulated by the potential of objects for action. The possibility of action between multiple objects enables the objects to be attended as a single group, and the fit between individual objects in a group and the action that can be performed influences responses to group members. In addition, having a goal state to perform a particular action affects the stimuli that are selected along with the features and area of space that is attended. These effects of action may reflect statistical learning between environmental cues that are linked by action and/or the coupling between perception and action systems in the brain. The data support the argument that visual selection is a flexible process that emerges as a need to prioritize objects for action. Visual selection for action The visual environments that we confront in everyday life typically contain multiple objects. However, having limited effector systems, we are constrained in the number of actions we can perform at any one time. To survive in such environments, we need to be able to select for action those stimuli that are of prime relevance to our behavioural goals. This reasoning led Allport (1987) to argue that visual selection is determined by our limited capacity for action. This argument is now almost taken as read in many accounts of visual attention and is expressed in different guises in models such as the integrative competition account of attention (Duncan, Humphreys, & Ward, 1997), the theory of visual attention (Bundesen, 1990; Bundesen, Habekost, & Kyllingsbaek, 2005), and the visual attention model (VAM; Schneider, 1995; Schneider & Deubel, 2002). Despite this argument being pervasive over the last 20 or so years, there has been surprisingly little consideration of how the specific constraints of action might modulate visual selection – for example, is there just a general constraint due to our having a limited number of effectors, or does action permeate attentional selection more deeply? * Correspondence should be addressed to Professor Glyn W. Humphreys, Behavioural Brain Sciences Centre, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK (e-mail: g.w.humphreys@bham.ac.uk). The British Psychological Society 185 British Journal of Psychology (2010), 101, 185–206 q 2010 The British Psychological Society www.bpsjournals.co.uk DOI:10.1348/000712609X458927