The relevance of action in perceiving affordances: Perception of catchableness of fly balls.

Abstract

The catchableness of a fly ball depends on whether the catcher can get to the ball in time; accurate judgments of catchableness must reflect both spatial and temporal aspects. Two experiments examined the perception of catchableness under conditions of restricted information pickup. Experiment 1 compared perceptual judgments with actual catching and revealed that stationary observers are poor perceivers of catchableness, as would be expected by the lack of information about running capabilities. In Experiment 2, participants saw the 1st part of ball trajectories before their vision was occluded. In 1 condition, they started to run (as if to catch the ball) before occlusion; in another, they remained stationary. Moving judgments were better than stationary judgments. This supports the idea that perceiving affordances that depend on kinematic, rather than merely geometric, body characteristics may require the relevant action to be performed. One of the assumptions of ecological psychology is that the environment is perceived in animal-relevant terms, that is, in terms of what the animal can do with and in the environment. Perception is seen as an active pickup of meaningful information that specifies the behavioral possibilities of the environment, also called affordances. These affordances (Gibson, 1979/1986) are the possibilities for action offered by the environment and the events that occur in it, described with respect to and in terms of the perceiving and acting animal. Ecological psychology claims that it is important for animals to perceive these affordances, so that the control of behavior can be adjusted to the possibilities for action that are supported by the environment. Most of the affordances that have been derived and investigated have concerned geometric relations between observer and environment (Carello, Grosofsky, Reichel,

Optic variables used to judge future ball arrival position in expert and novice soccer players

“…Focusing on the informational variable that provides the best prediction of response patterns, an analysis of both the information value corresponding to the critical point (separating goal and no-goal responses) and the sharpness of the goal/no-goal transition did not reveal any statistically significant differences between the groups of participants, regardless of whether they were experts (FP-1 and GK-1) or novices (NOV-1 and NOV-2). Together, these findings imply that expertise in soccer does not lie in the ability to make precise anticipatory judgments, but that it may-as previous research suggests-become apparent when perception is coupled to action (Farrow & Abernethy, 2003;Oudejans, Michaels, Bakker, & Dolné, 1996).…”

Shedding some light on catching in the dark: Perceptual mechanisms for catching fly balls.

“…Total flight times could not be determined in the present study. Earlier experiments using similar flight parameters (see Oudejans, Michaels, & Bakker, 1997;Oudejans, Michaels, Bakker, & Dome, 1996) yielded average flight times of about 2 s.…”

Examination of gaze behaviors under in situ and video simulation task constraints reveals differences in information pickup for perception and action

“…Thus, for the sake of participant safety, the penalty taker was instructed to aim penalties to two goal locations (Figure 2), equivalent to those studied by van der Kamp (2006), rather than the bottom corners of the goal. Although slightly different from those of the other conditions, the kick locations remained representative of those recorded for world-class performance (Morya, Bigatão, Lees, & Ranvaud, 2005) and did not jeopardize comparison of gaze with the verbal and simulated movement conditions (see Oudejans et al, 1996). Risk of injury to the participants was further reduced by using cushioned mats to soften their landings when they dove in response to the kicks.…”

“…The ventral stream is proposed to be responsible for perception of object information within the environment, whereas the dorsal stream is responsible for the visual control of goaldirected actions (Milner & Goodale, 2008). The neuroanatomical distinction of Milner and Goodale (1995) implies that the laboratory task constraints in many existing perorganism's bodily dimensions or action capabilities (Oudejans, Michaels, Bakker, & Dolné, 1996;Warren, 1984).…”