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Impact of planned movement direction on judgments of visual locations

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Abstract

The present study examined if and how the direction of planned hand movements affects the perceived direction of visual stimuli. In three experiments participants prepared hand movements that deviated regarding direction (“Experiment 1” and “2”) or distance relative to a visual target position (“Experiment 3”). Before actual execution of the movement, the direction of the visual stimulus had to be estimated by means of a method of adjustment. The perception of stimulus direction was biased away from planned movement direction, such that with leftward movements stimuli appeared somewhat more rightward than with rightward movements. Control conditions revealed that this effect was neither a mere response bias, nor a result of processing or memorizing movement cues. Also, shifting the focus of attention toward a cued location in space was not sufficient to induce the perceptual bias observed under conditions of movement preparation (“Experiment 4”). These results confirm that characteristics of planned actions bias visual perception, with the direction of bias (contrast or assimilation) possibly depending on the type of the representations (categorical or metric) involved.

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Notes

  1. The used sensitivity of the button presses to visible changes of line orientation included the possibility that a possible bias in estimates may not be accompanied by visible changes in line orientation. We, however, did not find any indices in the data that could confirm this assumption.

  2. Mean movement amplitude was more than 2 SD above the mean of the sample.

  3. Please note that we treat possible perception–action interactions in the tradition of action-related approaches of perception suggesting that motor processes constitute a kind of reference according to which sensory signals are scaled to form subjective perception (cf. Introduction). Within this tradition several “motor” variables may act as a “ruler” enriching perceptual experience (cf. e.g., Proffitt & Linkenauger, 2013) and, thus, in theory, all of them may have a sensory mapping in perception. Because effort is closely related to forces driving the joint along a given movement direction, its impact on sensory processing may be assumed to spread out along this trajectory.

  4. Two subjects failed to respond correctly in one of the invalid conditions. These missing response time values were replaced by the mean of the remaining participants in those conditions. Excluding these subjects from the analyses did not change the results (the critical interaction was still significant with p = .002).

  5. To evaluate to what extent this outcome might be due to trials in which attention was not shifted as required by the cue, we confined the same analysis to a subsample of all trials. In particular, trials with correct responses of the discrimination task in which the attentional cue was valid and error trials in which the cue was invalid were included (70 % of trials). This more conservative procedure which resembles the outlier rejection of the previous experiments did not substantially change the pattern of results.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grant KI 1620/1-1 awarded to W. Kirsch by the German Research Council (DFG).

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Würzburg, Röntgenring 11, 97070, Würzburg, Germany

    Wladimir Kirsch & Wilfried Kunde

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  1. Wladimir Kirsch
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Correspondence to Wladimir Kirsch.

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Kirsch, W., Kunde, W. Impact of planned movement direction on judgments of visual locations. Psychological Research 78, 705–720 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-013-0512-x

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