Seeing and doing: ability to act moderates orientation effects in object perception

We investigated whether the impact of an object's orientation on a perceiver's actions (an orientation effect) is moderated by the perceiver's ability to act on the object in question. To do this, we manipulated the physical location of presented objects (Experiment 1) and the perceiver's action capacity (Experiment 2). Regardless of the physical distance of the object, manual responses were sensitive to the object's orientation (the orientation effect) when the object was within the participant's action range but not when the object was outside of the action range. These results support an embodied view of object perception and shed light on peripersonal space representation.