Action Fluency Facilitates Perceptual Discrimination

Perception and action interact in nearly every moment of daily life. Previous studies have demonstrated not only that perceptual input shapes action but also that various factors associated with action—including individual abilities and biomechanical costs—influence perceptual decisions. However, it is unknown how action fluency affects the sensitivity of early-stage visual perception, such as orientation. To address this question, we used a dual-task paradigm: Participants prepared an action (e.g., grasping), while concurrently performing an orientation-change-detection task. We demonstrated that as actions became more fluent (e.g., as grasping errors decreased), perceptual-discrimination performance also improved. Importantly, we found that grasping training prior to discrimination enhanced subsequent perceptual sensitivity, supporting the notion of a reciprocal relation between perception and action.