Abstract
Human–Computer Interactions pose special demands on the motor system, especially regarding the virtual tool transformations underlying typical mouse movements. We investigated whether such virtual tool-transformed movements are similarly resistant to irrelevant variation of a target object as skilled natural movements are. Results show that such irrelevant information deteriorates performance in perceptual tasks, whereas movement parameters remain unaffected, suggesting that the control of virtual tools draws on the same mechanisms as natural actions do. The results are discussed in terms of their practical utility and recent findings investigating unskilled and transformed movements in the framework of the action/perception model and the integration of tools into the body schema.
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Notes
We preferred ANOVA over paired-samples t-tests to provide better comparability of the resulting effects sizes with subsequent analyses involving multiple factors.
The final y-coordinate was tightly restricted by the target zone participants were to click on, and we thus did not analyze this dependent measure.
We also computed means of x final and there were significant effects on this variable in Experiments 1b and 2. The corresponding inferential statistics can be found in Table 2; these effects, however, are trivial, since the box coordinates varied on the x-axis in these experiments.
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Janczyk, M., Pfister, R. & Kunde, W. Mice move smoothly: irrelevant object variation affects perception, but not computer mouse actions. Exp Brain Res 231, 97–106 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-013-3671-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-013-3671-5