Action-specific judgment, not perception: Fitts’ law performance is related to estimates of target width only when participants are given a performance score

Zelaznik, Howard N.; Forney, Laura A.

doi:10.3758/s13414-016-1132-5

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Consequently, even in the case of grasping responses, we agree with Bub et al that "very strong evidence is needed" (p. 66) before reaching a firm conclusion that even a subset of compatibility effects in choice-reaction tasks is a consequence of limb-specific motor representations rather than abstract response codes. Regardless of whether such effects are due predominantly to spatial coding (Proctor & Vu, 2006) or to affordances (Gibson, 1979), it is apparent that the decisions and actions a person tends to make directly, or automatically, are determined by various factors including task goals, object properties, and the environmental context in which the person is operating (e.g., Zelaznik & Forney, 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual salience, not the graspable part of a pictured eating utensil, grabs attention

Xiong

Proctor

Zelaznik

2019

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Three experiments used compatible and incompatible mappings of images of eating utensils to test the hypothesis that these images activate affordances for grasping with the corresponding hand when the required response is a key-press. In Experiment 1, stimuli were photographs of a plastic spoon oriented on the horizontal axis, with the handle location varying randomly between left and right. Participants were instructed to respond to the handle or the tip, with a compatible mapping in one trial block and an incompatible mapping in another. A benefit for the compatible mapping was evident when the spoon tip was defined as relevant and a smaller cost when the handle was defined as relevant, suggesting a larger influence of the tip than the handle. In Experiment 2, the stimuli were photographs of bamboo chopsticks, for which the functional end is pointed and the graspable end is squared. East Asian participants familiar with chopsticks showed compatibility effects that did not differ significantly between the two ends. In Experiment 3, the chopstick handles were colored red to make them relatively more distinct than the tips. Both East Asian participants (Experiment 3B) and a more diverse sample (Experiment 3A) showed a benefit of the compatible mapping when the handle was defined as task relevant but not when the functional end was. Altogether, the results provide evidence that left-right location of a visually salient feature is the main factor driving these compatibility effects, rather than the automatic activation of a grasping affordance.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual salience, not the graspable part of a pictured eating utensil, grabs attention

Xiong

Proctor

Zelaznik

2019

Atten Percept Psychophys

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“…Differences in cognitive processing and/or task familiarity could have contributed to the observed differences in predicted MTs [ 29 , 30 ]. For example, Zelaznik and Forney [ 31 ], found that perception of Fitts’s task difficulty (target width) was only related to motor performance if participants received a score after they performed the task. This finding indicates that knowledge of performance, in addition to motor experience is important for the accuracy of perceptual judgments (also see [ 32 ]).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Limited Previous Motor Experience on Action Possibility Judgments in People with Spinal Muscle Atrophy

Heirani Moghaddam,

Sen,

Carson

et al. 2023

Brain Sciences

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Previous studies have shown that people with limited motor capabilities may rely on previous motor experience when making action possibility judgments for others. In the present study, we examined if having limited previous motor experience, as a consequence of spinal muscle atrophy (SMA), alters action possibility judgments. Participants with SMA and neurologically healthy (NH) sex- and age-matched controls performed a perceptual-motor judgment task using the Fitts’s law paradigm. Participants observed apparent motion videos of reciprocal aiming movements with varying levels of difficulty. For each movement, participants predicted the shortest movement time (MT) at which a neurologically healthy young adult could accurately perform the task. Participants with SMA predicted significantly longer MTs compared to controls; however, the predicted MTs of both SMA and NH participants exhibited a Fitts’s law relationship (i.e., the predicted MTs significantly increased as movement difficulty increased). Overall, these results provide evidence that participants with SMA who have limited, or no motor experience may make more conservative action possibility judgments for others. Critically, our finding that the pattern of action possibility judgments was not different between SMA and NH groups suggests that limited previous motor experience may not completely impair action possibility judgments.

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“…If action-specific scaling effects truly reflect changes in what is perceived in this strong sense, then this has major implications for standard, modular theories of vision, which hold that perception is encapsulated and separate from cognition (Pylyshyn, 1999 ; for a recent review, see Firestone & Scholl, 2015 ). However, a major debate concerning the action-specific account is whether the observed scaling effects reflect judgement rather than perception (Collier & Lawson, 2017 ; Durgin et al, 2009 ; Durgin, Klein, Spiegel, Strawset & Williams, 2012 ; Firestone & Scholl, 2014 ; Zelaznik & Forney, 2016 ; for reviews, see Firestone, 2013 ; Firestone & Scholl, 2015 ; Philbeck & Witt, 2015 ; Proffitt & Linkenauger, 2013 ; Witt, 2011 , 2016 ). Specifically, participants’ responses may not reflect differences in what they actually perceive; rather, their spatial estimates may be affected by nonperceptual influences such as their beliefs about the purpose of the experiment.…”

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confidence: 99%

Does grasping capacity influence object size estimates? It depends on the context

Collier

Lawson

2017

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Linkenauger, Witt, and Proffitt (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 37(5), 1432–1441, 2011, Experiment 2) reported that right-handers estimated objects as smaller if they intended to grasp them in their right rather than their left hand. Based on the action-specific account, they argued that this scaling effect occurred because participants believed their right hand could grasp larger objects. However, Collier and Lawson (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 43(4), 749–769, 2017) failed to replicate this effect. Here, we investigated whether this discrepancy in results arose from demand characteristics. We investigated two forms of demand characteristics: altering responses following conscious hypothesis guessing (Experiments 1 and 2), and subtle influences of the experimental context (Experiment 3). We found no scaling effects when participants were given instructions which implied the expected outcome of the experiment (Experiment 1), but they were obtained when we used unrealistically explicit instructions which gave the exact prediction made by the action-specific account (Experiment 2). Scaling effects were also found using a context in which grasping capacity could seem relevant for size estimation (by asking participants about the perceived graspability of an object immediately before asking about its size on every trial, as was done in Linkenauger et al., 2011; Experiment 2). These results suggest that demand characteristics due to context effects could explain the scaling effects reported in Experiment 2 of Linkenauger et al. (2011), rather than either hypothesis guessing, or, as proposed by the action-specific account, a change in the perceived size of objects.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.3758/s13414-017-1344-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Action-specific judgment, not perception: Fitts’ law performance is related to estimates of target width only when participants are given a performance score

Cited by 3 publications

References 22 publications

Visual salience, not the graspable part of a pictured eating utensil, grabs attention

Visual salience, not the graspable part of a pictured eating utensil, grabs attention

The Impact of Limited Previous Motor Experience on Action Possibility Judgments in People with Spinal Muscle Atrophy

Does grasping capacity influence object size estimates? It depends on the context

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