Within reach but not so reachable: Obstacles matter in visual perception of distances

A large number of studies have shown that effort influences the visual perception of reaching distance. These studies have mainly focused on the effects of reach-relevant properties of the body and of the objects that people intend to reach. However, any influence of the reach-relevant properties of the surrounding environment remains still speculative. We investigated this topic in terms of the role of obstacle width in perceiving distances. Participants had to estimate the straight-line distance to a cylinder located just behind a transparent barrier of varying width. The results showed that participants perceived the straight-line distance to the cylinder as being longer when they intended to grasp the cylinder by reaching around a wide transparent barrier rather than by reaching around narrower ones. Interestingly, this effect might be due to the anticipated effort involved in reaching. Together, our results show that reach-relevant properties of the surrounding environment influence perceived distances, thereby supporting an embodied view of the visual perception of space.     

Motor simulation in tool-use effect on distance estimation: A replication of Witt and Proffitt (2008)

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Witt and Proffit (Human Perception and Performance, 34 (6), 1479–1492, 2008) hypothesized that when people intend to reach a target, they run a motor...     

Close to me? The influence of affective closeness on space perception

Recent data show that psychosocial factors affect visual perception. We tested this hypothesis by investigating the relationship between affective closeness and the perception of apertures between two people. People feel discomfort when they are near someone they are not affectively close to. Therefore, we predict that they will be less likely to perceive that they can pass between two people not affectively close to them. Participants had to imagine passing through the aperture between two life-size classmate pictures. We found that the closer participants felt to their classmates, the more they felt able to pass between them. This provides the first evidence of a relationship between affective closeness and the perception of aperture between two people, suggesting that psychosocial factors constrain space perception.     

Getting a tool gives wings: overestimation of tool-related benefits in a motor imagery task and a decision task

Two experiments examine whether people overestimate the benefits provided by tool use in motor tasks. Participants had to move different quantities of objects by hand (two at a time) or with a tool (four at a time). The tool was not within reach so participants had to get it before moving the objects. In Experiment 1, the task was performed in a real and an imagined situation. In Experiment 2, participants had to decide for each quantity, whether they preferred moving the objects by hand or with the tool. Our findings indicated that people perceive tool actions as less costly in terms of movement time than they actually are (Experiment 1) and decide to use a tool even when it objectively provides less time-based benefits than using the hands (Experiment 2). Taken together, the data suggest that people overestimate the benefits provided by tool use.     

Moving forward is not only a metaphor: Approach and avoidance lead to self-evaluative assimilation and contrast

Could it be that walking toward (vs. away) someone else changes your self-evaluation in the direction of what this person is? We answer positively and argue that approach movements lead to self-evaluative assimilation (a higher self-evaluation with a high vs. a low standard), while avoidance movements lead to self-evaluative contrast (a lower self-evaluation with a high vs. a low standard). Hence, we predict that approach/avoidance moderates the impact of comparison information on self-evaluation. To test this idea, participants were either primed with approach or avoidance before processing comparison information (Study 1) or physically had to walk toward or away from this information (Studies 2 and 3). Results on self-evaluated adjustment (Studies 1 and 2) and self-evaluated attractiveness measures (Study 3) confirmed our predictions. These studies suggest ways to behave to self-evaluate positively when hearing about others.     

Visual perception of writing and pointing movements

Studies of movement production have shown that the relationship between the amplitude of a movement and its duration varies according to the type of gesture. In the case of pointing movements the duration increases as a function of distance and width of the target (Fitts' law), whereas for writing movements the duration tends to remain constant across changes in trajectory length (isochrony principle). We compared the visual perception of these two categories of movement. The participants judged the speed of a light spot that portrayed the motion of the end-point of a hand-held pen (pointing or writing). For the two types of gesture we used 8 stimulus sizes (from 2.5 cm to 20 cm) and 32 durations (from 0.2 s to 1.75 s). Viewing each combination of size and duration, participants had to indicate whether the movement speed seemed "fast", "slow", or "correct". Results showed that the participants' perceptual preferences were in agreement with the rules of movement production. The stimulus size was more influential in the pointing condition than in the writing condition. We consider that this finding reflects the influence of common representational resources for perceptual judgment and movement production.