Chapter 2: The neural pathway of sport actions: from seeing and hearing to doing: perception-action relationships.

This chapter discusses a partial overview of the neuroscientific knowledge of sports performance. Our body is a beautiful machine able to receive different sources of information from the environment and to produce actions that in turn transform the environment. Traditionally, scientists from biomechanics, motor control and robotics were the specialists interested in understanding the body and its movements. One of the principal roles played by the connection between perceptual and motor functions is organizing actions in advance. The ventral pathway is involved when perception is simply for action recognition and has not a specific goal. A parallel neural network serves the perception of non-facial body parts. Representation of the human body is not only tied to sensori-motor information. Indeed, perceiving one's own and others' body heavily relies on visual information. One important implication for this hypothesized relationship between perception and action is that predictions can be made from an analysis of an action to define perception and vice versa.