Abstract
In many situations, multiple actions are possible to achieve a goal. How do people select a particular action among equally possible alternatives? In six experiments, we determined whether action selection is consistent and biased toward one decision by observing participants’ decisions to go over or under a horizontal bar set at varying heights. We assessed the height at which participants transitioned from going over to under the bar within a “gray zone”—the range of bar heights at which going over and under were both possible. In Experiment 1, participants’ transition points were consistently located near the upper boundary of the gray zone, indicating a bias to go over rather than under the bar. Moreover, transitional behaviors were clustered tightly into a small region, indicating that decisions were highly consistent. Subsequent experiments examined potential influences on action selection. In Experiment 2, participants wore ankle weights to increase the cost of going over the bar. In Experiment 3, they were tested on a padded surface that made crawling under the bar more comfortable. In Experiment 4, we introduced a secondary task that required participants to crawl immediately after navigating the bar. None of these manipulations altered participants’ decisions relative to Experiment 1. In Experiment 5, participants started in a crawling position, which led to significantly lower transition points. In Experiment 6, we tested 5- to 6-year-old children as in Experiment 1 to determine the effects of social pressure on action selection. Children displayed lower transition points, larger transition regions, and reduced ability to go over the bar compared to adults. Across experiments, results indicate that adults have a strong and robust bias for upright locomotion.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abitbol MM (1988) Effect of posture and locomotion on energy expenditure. Am J Phys Anthropol 77:191–199
Brown BR (1970) Face-saving following experimentally induced embarrassment. J Exp Soc Psychol 6:255–271
Browning RC, Modica JR, Kram R, Goswami A (2007) The effects of adding mass to the legs on the energetics and biomechanics of walking. Med Sci Sports Exerc 39:515–525
Bryden, PJ, Mayer M, Roy EA (2011) Influences of task complexity, object location, and object type on hand selection in left and right-handed children and adults. Dev Psychobiol 53:47–58
Comalli DM, Franchak JM, Char A, Adolph KE (2013) Ledge and wedge: Younger and older adults’ perception of action possibilities. Exp Brain Res 228:183–192
Comalli DM, Keen R, Abraham E, Foo VJ, Lee MH, Adolph K (2016) The development of tool use: planning for end-state comfort. Dev Psychol 52:1878–1892
Cowie D, Smith L, Braddick O (2010) The development of locomotor planning for end-state comfort. Perception 39:661–670
Franchak JM, Adolph KE (2014) Affordances as probabilistic functions: implications for development, perception, and decisions for action. Ecol Psychol 26:109–124
Franchak JM, Celano EC, Adolph KE (2012) Perception of passage through openings cannot be explained geometric body dimensions alone. Exp Brain Res 223:301–310
Gibson JJ (1979) The ecological approach to visual perception. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston
Granacher U, Gollhofer A, Kriemler S (2010) Effects of balance training on postural sway, leg extensor strength, and jumping height in adolescents. Res Q Exerc Sport 81:245–251
Hackney AL, Cinelli ME (2013a) Action strategies used by children to avoid two vertical obstacles in non-confined space. Exp Brain Res 229:13–22
Hackney AL, Cinelli ME (2013b) Young and older adults use body-scaled information during a non-confined aperture crossing task. Exp Brain Res 225:419–429
Hackney AL, Vallis LA, Cinelli ME (2013) Action strategies of individuals during aperture crossing in nonconfined space. Quart J Exp Psychol 66:1104–1112
Keen R, Lee MH, Adolph KE (2014) Planning an action: a developmental progression in tool use. Ecol Psychol 26:96–108
Kording KP, Wolpert DM (2006) Bayesian decision theory in sensorimotor control. Trends Cognit Sci 10:319–326
Mark LS (1987) Eyeheight-scaled information about affordances: a study of sitting and stair climbing. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 13:361–370
Mark LS, Nemeth K, Gardner D, Dainoff MJ, Paasche J, Duffy M, Grandt K (1997) Postural dynamics and the preferred critical boundary for visually guided reaching. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 23:1365
Mark LS, Ye L, Smart LJ (2017) Perceiving the nesting of affordances for complex goal-directed actions. In: Hoffman RR et al. (eds) The Cambridge handbook of applied perception research. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 547–567
Morrissey SJ, George CE, Ayoub MM (1985) Metabolic costs of stoopwalking and crawling. Appl Ergon 16:99–102
Pufall PB, Dunbar C (1992) Perceiving whether or not the world affords stepping onto and over: a developmental study. Ecol Psychol 4:17–38
Rosenbaum DA, Marchak F, Barnes HJ, Vaughan J, Slotta J, Jorgensen M (1990) Constraints for action selection: Overhand versus underhand grips. In: Jeannerod M (ed) Attention and performance XIII: motor representation and control. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, pp 321–342
Rosenbaum DA, Chapman KM, Weigelt M, Weiss DJ, van der Wel R (2012) Cognition, action, and object manipulation. Psychol Bull 138:924–946
Scharoun S, Bryden P (2013) The development of end-state comfort and beginning state comfort in a cup manipulation task. Dev Psychobiol 56:407–420
Stefanucci JK, Geuss MN (2010) Duck! Scaling the height of a horizontal barrier to body height. Atten Percept Psychophys 72: 1338–1349.
Stoffregen TA (2003) Affordances as properties of the animal-environment system. Ecol Psychol 15:115–134
Thibaut JP, Toussaint L (2010) Developing motor planning over ages. J Exp Child Psychol 105:116–129
Trommershäuser J, Maloney LT, Landy MS (2008) Decision making, movement planning, and statistical decision theory. Trends Cogn Sci 12:291–297
van der Meer, A. L. H. (1997) Visual guidance of passing under a barrier. Early Dev Parent 6:149–157
Wagman JB, Caputo SE, Stoffregen TA (2016) Hierarchical nesting of affordances in a tool use task. J Exp Psychol 42:1627–1642
Warren WH (1984) Perceiving affordances: visual guidance of stair climbing. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 10:683–703
Warren WH, Whang S (1987) Visual guidance of walking through apertures: Body-scaled information for affordances. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 13:371–383
Wunsch K, Henning A, Aschersleben G, Weigelt M (2013) A systematic review of the end-state comfort effect in normally developing children and in children with developmental disorders. J Motor Learn Dev 1:59–76
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by National Institute of Health and Human Development Grant R37-HD033486 to Karen E. Adolph and by a grant from the New York University Dean’s Undergraduate Research Fund to Dhandevi Persand. We thank members of the NYU Infant Action Lab for their help, in particular, Sara Fernandes for serving as our model to illustrate the procedure and actions, and Victoria Foo for assistance with data collection and coding.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Comalli, D.M., Persand, D. & Adolph, K.E. Motor decisions are not black and white: selecting actions in the “gray zone”. Exp Brain Res 235, 1793–1807 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-017-4879-6
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-017-4879-6