The current study sought to investigate the relationship between attention, perception and memory in the perception and recall of attended and unattended properties of objects. Two experiments tested whether the intention to perceive maximum overhead reaching height with the use of handheld rods with different mass and rotational inertia yielded information for participants to remember the rods’ heaviness after they were removed from view. Participants remembered the difference in heaviness of rods but only when haptic information was solely available during the earlier perception of overhead reaching height and vision was occluded. The results support an ecological approach to perception, attention and memory, and suggest that information detected for perception can be later used to remember other object properties that have a correlated informational basis.

The human perceptual-motor system is tightly coupled to the physical and informational dynamics of a task environment and these dynamics operate to constrain the high-dimensional order of the human movement system into low-dimensional, task-specific synergies. The aim of the current study was to determine whether synergistic processes constrain and organize the behavior of coacting individuals. Participants sat next to each other and each used one arm to complete a pointer-to-target task. Using the uncontrolled manifold, the structure of joint-angle variance was examined to determine whether there was synergistic organization at the interpersonal or intrapersonal levels. The results revealed the motor actions performed were synergistically organized at both the interpersonal and intrapersonal levels. More importantly, the interpersonal synergy was found to be significantly stronger than the intrapersonal synergies. Accordingly, the results provide clear evidence that the action dynamics of co-acting individuals can become temporarily organized to form single synergistic twoperson systems.