Abstract:

Over the last decade, there has been a growing body of research suggesting that recognition of a manipulable object not only involves analysis of visual information input, but also entails processing of action information associated with grasping or using it. Accumulating evidence from behavioral, neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies has suggested that action information automatically evoked in the process of object identification is an essential part of object representation. Research on object manipulability has shed new lights on the phenomenon of category specificity effect, including living/nonliving and noun/verb dissociations. It will also bring a new perspective for the better understanding of object representation as well as provide theoretical implication to further research on neural pathways of visual object recognition.

Key words: manipulability, object recognition, object representation