Catching ease influences perceived speed: Evidence for action-specific effects from action-based measures

According to the action-specific account of perception, people perceive the environment in terms of their ability to act. Here, we directly tested this claim by using an action-based measure of perceived speed: Participants attempted to catch a virtual fish by releasing a virtual net. The net varied in size, making the task easier or harder. We measured perceived speed by using explicit judgment-based measures and an action-based measure (time to release the net). Participants released the net later when playing with the big as compared with the small net, indicating that the fish looked to be moving more slowly when participants played with the big net. Explicit judgments of fish speed were similarly influenced by net size. These results provide converging evidence from both explicit and action-based measures that a perceiver’s ability to act influences a common underlying process, most likely perceived speed, rather than postperceptual processes such as response formation.     

book reviews

Deviance: Voices from the Margin, edited by James K. Skipper, Jr., William L. McWhorter, Charles H. McCaghy, and Mark Lefton. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1981, 207 pages, $8.95.

Crime in American Society, by Charles H. McCaghy, New York: Macmillan, 1980, 368 pages.     

Book review

Gangbangs and Drive‐bys: Grounded Culture and Juvenile Gang Violence. By William B. Sanders, New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1994, 198 pages. (ISBN 0–202–30536–8)     

Action potential influences spatial perception: Evidence for genuine top-down effects on perception

The action-specific account of spatial perception asserts that a perceiver’s ability to perform an action, such as hitting a softball or walking up a hill, impacts the visual perception of the target object. Although much evidence is consistent with this claim, the evidence has been challenged as to whether perception is truly impacted, as opposed to the responses themselves. These challenges have recently been organized as six pitfalls that provide a framework with which to evaluate the empirical evidence. Four case studies of action-specific effects are offered as evidence that meets the framework’s high bar, and thus that demonstrates genuine perceptual effects. That action influences spatial perception is evidence that perceptual and action-related processes are intricately and bidirectionally linked.     

Performance and ease influence perceived speed

According to the action-specific perception account, perception is a function of optical information and the perceiver's ability to perform the intended action. While most of the evidence for the action-specific perception account is on spatial perception, in the current experiments we examined similar effects in the perception of speed. Tennis players reproduced the time the ball traveled from the feeder machine to when they hit it. The players judged the ball to be moving faster on trials when they hit the ball out-of-bounds than on trials where they successfully hit the ball in-bounds. Follow-up experiments in the laboratory showed that participants judged virtual balls to be moving slower when they played with a bigger paddle in a modified version of Pong. These studies suggest that performance and task ease influence perceived speed.     

Putting to a bigger hole: Golf performance relates to perceived size

When people are engaged in a skilled behavior, such as occurs in sports, their perceptions relate optical information to their performance. In the present research, we demonstrate the effects of performance on size perception in golfers. We found that golfers who played better judged the hole to be bigger than did golfers who did not play as well. In follow-up laboratory experiments, participants putted on a golf mat from a location near or far from the hole and then judged the size of the hole. Participants who putted from the near location perceived the hole to be bigger than did participants who putted from the far location. Our results demonstrate that perception is influenced by the perceiver’s current ability to act effectively in the environment.     

Hypothalamo-Pituitary-Adrenocortical Regulation Following Lesions of the Central Nucleus of the Amygdala

Previous reports indicate that the central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA) stimulates adrenocorticotropin and corticosterone secretion, suggesting a role for this region in central hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) stress regulation. To evaluate this hypothesis, this study assessed the impact of CeA lesion on the response of hypophysiotrophic paraventricular nucleus (PVN) neurons to acute restraint and chronic unpredictable stress exposure. In contrast to previous reports, CeA lesions did not affect corticosterone or ACTH secretion induced by acute stress. Acute restraint increased PVN corticotropin releasing hormone (CRH) mRNA expression, increased the number of parvocellular PVN neurons expressing the co-secretagogue arginine vasopressin (AVP), and induced cFOS mRNA expression in the parvocellular PVN. However, there was no additional effect of CeA lesion on any measure of PVN activation. Chronic unpredictable stress exposure induced long-term activation of the HPA axis, noted by thymic involution, adrenal hypertrophy and increased PVN CRH mRNA expression. Stress-induced changes in thymus and adrenal weights were not affected by CeA lesion. Further, CeA lesion rats did not differ from controls in post-stress CRH mRNA expression. However, basal CRH mRNA expression was increased in the PVN of CeA rats, suggesting that the CeA plays a role in long-term inhibition of the PVN. The results of these studies are not consistent with the hypothesis that the CeA is necessary for stress-induced pituitary-adrenocortical activation. Rather, this region may play a stressor-specific modulatory role in regulation of HPA function.     

Assessment and prediction in an ecological system: Application of the general linear model to the response-class concept

This study investigated the extent to which observed frequencies of covarying responses could be utilized in the prediction of classroom behavior. Five behavior categories were observed daily over a 12-week period in the regular classroom settings of four fifth-grade and two fourth-grade male students. For each subject, stepwise regression analyses were conducted to determine which behaviors accounted for the largest proportions of variance in a single response category. The proportions of variance explained in the behavior categories of the subjects ranged from 8.9 to 75.4%. Further, response categories serving as predictor variables, as well as the number of predictor variables entered into the equations, differed across subjects. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for behavioral assessment and treatment application.