Abstract
Over the past decade there has been a great deal of controversy regarding the relative impact of visual illusions on cognitive judgments and the control of goal-directed action. We report the results of two experiments indicating that perceptual biases associated with the Müller-Lyer illusion involve a misjudgment of amplitude/extent while aiming biases involve error in the specification of a movement endpoint. This dissociation of perception and action is consistent with some aspects of Milner and Goodale’s two visual system model, but not others.
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Notes
Binsted and colleagues (Binsted and Elliott 1999a; Binsted et al. 2001) demonstrated that both eye and open-loop hand movements are biased by M-L configurations in which tails were present at only the target end of the figure. It appears that when visual information about the position of the hand is not available during movement execution, extraretinal information about the position and movement of the eyes contributes to manual aiming bias.
Catching a moving object, such as a ball, depends partly on our ability to perceive the expansion of the ball’s texture elements relative to the elements in the visual background and to regulate a hand movement accordingly (Elliott and Meegan 2004).
One could argue that always starting the movement at the left vertex of a configuration would lead participants to adopt an end position strategy (i.e., simply ignore the left vertex). However, it was also the case that target lines and comparison lines always originated at the left vertex in the perceptual protocol. Thus, perceptual judgments could have been made based only on the endpoint of the target and comparison shafts. This was not the case.
Tremblay and Elliott (2003) have shown that cognitive vs. motor decision-making influences the magnitude of vestibular bias on judgments of the visual straight-ahead in the absence of any visual context (i.e., a completely dark room).
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This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canada Research Chairs Programme
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Glazebrook, C.M., Dhillon, V.P., Keetch, K.M. et al. Perception-action and the Müller-Lyer illusion: amplitude or endpoint bias?. Exp Brain Res 160, 71–78 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-004-1986-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-004-1986-y