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Performance variability and affordance perception: practice effects on perceptual judgments for walking versus
Christina Hospodar1, John Franchak2, Karen Adolph3
1Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA.
Experimental Brain Research
|July 11, 2023
Summary
Practice improves our ability to judge action possibilities (affordances), regardless of whether the action is highly variable, like throwing, or less variable, like walking. This enhances perceptual judgments for all types of motor skills.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Motor Control
- Perception-Action
Background:
- Perceiving affordances is crucial for judging action possibility.
- Action performance can be inherently variable, complicating perceptual judgments.
- Practice enhances affordance perception, but its effectiveness with variable actions is unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if practice equally improves perceptual judgments for actions with differing performance variability.
- To compare the impact of practice on affordance perception for walking versus throwing.
Main Methods:
- Thirty adults judged affordances for walking and throwing through doorways.
- Participants completed 75 practice trials for each action.
- Performance variability was quantified, and judgment error was analyzed pre- and post-practice.
Main Results:
- Throwing performance was more variable than walking.
- Absolute judgment error decreased proportionally with practice for both actions.
- Individual differences in performance variability did not correlate with judgment error.
Conclusions:
- Practice effectively calibrates perceptual judgments for affordances, irrespective of action variability.
- The findings suggest that practice benefits perceptual calibration even with mixed feedback inherent in variable actions.
