Perception and Action Are Inseparable

In her article, Michaels (2000) defined action as “a temporally bounded, observable, goal-directed movement (or non-movement) that entails intention, the detection of information, and a lawful relation between that information and the movement ” (p. 251). She defined perception as “the detection of information ” (p. 244). This forces one to conclude that it is impossible to study action separately from perception. We ar-gue that perceptual judgments are communicated by movements and that it is impos-sible to distinguish movements reporting perceptual judgments from other movements, so we conclude that the reverse also is true: It is impossible to study per-ception separately from action. Before trying to distinguish between perception and action, one must of course de-fine them accurately. Michaels (2000) started by defining perception (ecologically) as “the detection of information ” (p. 244). She pointed out that a clear definition of action is missing in the work of Goodale and Milner (1992) and comes with a (new) definition of action: “a temporally bounded, observable, goal-directed movement (or non-movement) that entails intention, the detection of information, and a law-ful relation between that information and the movement ” (p. 251). This definition binds action to perception, as it states that there can be no action without detection of information (which is perception). Can there be perception without action? The problem with this question is the measurement of perception. There is no way to do so other than by activating muscles to speak, press a button, move a mouse, and s