People are known to be very poor at visually judging acceleration. Yet, they are extremely proficient at intercepting balls that fall under gravitational acceleration. How is this possible? We previously found that people make systematic errors when trying to tap on targets that move with different constant accelerations or decelerations on interleaved trials. Here, we show that providing contextual information that indicates how the target will decelerate on the next trial does not reduce such errors. Such errors do rapidly diminish if the same deceleration is present on successive trials. After observing several targets move with a particular acceleration or deceleration without attempting to tap on them, participants tapped as if they had never experienced the acceleration or deceleration. Thus, people presumably deal with acceleration when catching or hitting a ball by compensating for the errors that they made on preceding attempts.
How Can People Be so Good at Intercepting Accelerating Objects if They Are so Poor at Visually Judging Acceleration?
E. Brenner,Inés Abalo Rodriguez,V. E. Muñoz,S. Schootemeijer,Yannick Mahieu,Kirsten Veerkamp,Marit A. Zandbergen,Tim van der Zee,J. Smeets
Published 2016 in i-Perception
ABSTRACT
PUBLICATION RECORD
- Publication year
2016
- Venue
i-Perception
- Publication date
2016-01-22
- Fields of study
Medicine, Engineering, Psychology
- Identifiers
- External record
- Source metadata
Semantic Scholar, PubMed
CITATION MAP
EXTRACTION MAP
CLAIMS
CONCEPTS
- contextual information
Information presented before a trial that indicates how the target will decelerate on the upcoming attempt.
- interleaved trials
A trial sequence in which targets with different constant accelerations or decelerations alternate across trials.
- observation-only trials
Trials in which participants watch the target move without attempting to tap it.
- preceding attempts
Earlier tapping attempts that provide the immediate motor experience used for later adjustment.
- successive trials
Consecutive trials in which the same deceleration is repeated.
- tapping errors
The systematic mismatch between where or when participants tap and the target's actual position or timing.
REFERENCES
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Showing 1-26 of 26 citing papers · Page 1 of 1