Learned patterns of action-effect anticipation contribute to the spatial displacement of continuously moving stimuli

When participants control the horizontal movements of a stimulus and indicate its vanishing point after it unexpectedly vanishes, the perceived vanishing point is displaced beyond the actual vanishing point, and the size of the displacement is directly related to the action-effect anticipation one has to generate to successfully control the stimulus. The present experiments examined whether learning a pattern of action-effect anticipation would later impact one's perception of moving stimuli. While 1 participant (the controller) controlled a dot's movements across a computer screen, another (the observer), who could neither see nor hear the controller, watched the dot's movements on a separate monitor. When the dot unexpectedly vanished, the observer indicated the vanishing point. After 40 trials, participants switched roles. While serving as observers, all participants generated forward displacements, but those who did so after acquiring control experience produced larger displacement. Subsequent experiments indicated the larger displacement was due to action-effect anticipation the participants learned while either controlling the dot or observing another do so.