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What you see and what you are told: an action-specific effect that is unaffected by explicit feedback

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Abstract

A critical question for theories of spatial vision concerns the nature of the inputs to perception. The action-specific account asserts that information related to action, specifically a perceiver’s ability to perform the intended action, is one of these sources of information. This claim challenges assumptions about the mind in general and perception in particular, and not surprisingly, has been met with much resistance. Alternative explanations include that these effects are due to response bias, rather than genuine differences in perception. Using a paradigm in which ease to block a ball impacts estimated speed of the ball, participants were given explicit feedback about their perceptual judgements to test the response bias alternative. Despite the feedback, the action-specific effect still persisted, thus ruling out a response-bias interpretation. Coupled with other research ruling out additional alternative explanations, the current findings offer an important step towards the claim that a person’s ability to act truly influences spatial perception.

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Notes

  1. An alternative method would be to look at the just-noticeable differences (JNDs). However, JNDs cannot be computed for participants whose data showed quasi-complete separation, so proportion correct was considered instead.

  2. An exception to this is that post-events can influence perception, which is known as postdiction. Thus, it is possible that trial outcome could affect perceived ball speed. We are unaware of any techniques to separate postdictive explanations from judgment-based explanations and thus take the more conservative view that any effects of trial outcome are due to response biases or judgment-based effects rather than being genuinely perceptual. An argument that the effect of trial outcome is perceptual would be consistent with the action-specific account of perception (for extended discussion on this issue, see Witt, Tenhundfeld, & Bielak, 2017).

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Acknowledgements

We thank Lew Harvey for his help analyzing the data. This work was supported by Grants from the National Science Foundation to JKW (BCS-1348916 and BCS-1632222).

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  1. Department of Psychology, Colorado State University, Behavioral Sciences Building, Fort Collins, CO, 80523, USA

    Zachary R. King, Nathan L. Tenhundfeld & Jessica K. Witt

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  1. Zachary R. King
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  2. Nathan L. Tenhundfeld
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  3. Jessica K. Witt
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Correspondence to Jessica K. Witt.

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All procedures were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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King, Z.R., Tenhundfeld, N.L. & Witt, J.K. What you see and what you are told: an action-specific effect that is unaffected by explicit feedback. Psychological Research 82, 507–519 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-017-0848-8

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