Modeling Interaction and Integration of Perception and Action

To account for perceptual and action-related stages of information processing, most prominent cognitive architectures have extended their coverage from primarily cognitive processes to perceptual processing and response execution (e.g. EPIC (Kieras & Meyer, 1997); ACT-R/PM (Byrne & Anderson, 1998)). However, despite these extensions they are typically still too limited to explain some well-known phenomena from the perception-action domain in cognitive psychology such as stimulus-response compatibility effects (e.g., Simon Effect (Simon & Rudell, 1967), and action preparation influences on perception (e.g., Müsseler & Hommel, 1997). These phenomena suggest that perception and action are more intimately related than these architectures allow for. We are currently developing HiTEC (Haazebroek, Raffone & Hommel, submitted), a novel cognitive architecture that stresses both the interaction and integration between perception and action. Here we describe the overall structure and general principles of HiTEC and we demonstrate how a variety of psychological phenomena in the perception-action domain can be replicated using computer simulations of the model.