Motor System’s Role in Grounding, Receptive Field Development, and Shape Recognition

Vision is basically a sensory modality, so it is no surprise that the investigation into the brain’s visual functions has been focused on its sensory aspect. Thus, questions like (1) how can external geometric properties represented in internal states of the visual system be grounded, (2) how do the visual cortical receptive fields (RFs) form, and (3) how can visual shapes be recognized have all been addressed within the framework of sensory information processing. However, this view is being challenged on multiple fronts, with an increasing emphasis on the motor aspect of visual function. In this paper, we will review works that implicate the important role of motor function in vision, and discuss our latest results touching upon the issues of grounding, RF development, and shape recognition. Our main findings are that (1) motor primitives play a fundamental role in grounding, (2) RF learning can be biased and enhanced by the motor system, and (3) shape recognition is easier with motorbased representations than with sensor-based representations. The insights we gained here will help us better understand visual cortical function. Also, we expect the motor-oriented view of visual cortical function to be generalizable to other sensory cortices such as somatosensory and auditory cortices.