Direct perception of action-scaled affordances: The shrinking gap problem.
- 1 January 2011
- journal article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
- Vol. 37 (5), 1442-1457
- https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023510
Abstract
The aim of this study was to investigate the perception of possibilities for action (i.e., affordances) that depend on one's movement capabilities, and more specifically, the passability of a shrinking gap between converging obstacles. We introduce a new optical invariant that specifies in intrinsic units the minimum locomotor speed needed to safely pass through a shrinking gap. Detecting this information during self-motion requires recovering the component of the obstacles' local optical expansion attributable to obstacle motion, independent of self-motion. In principle, recovering the obstacle motion component could involve either visual or non-visual self-motion information. We investigated the visual and non-visual contributions in two experiments in which subjects walked through a virtual environment and made judgments about whether it was possible to pass through a shrinking gap. On a small percentage of trials, visual and non-visual self-motion information were independently manipulated by varying the speed with which subjects moved through the virtual environment. Comparisons of judgments on such catch trials with judgments on normal trials revealed both visual and non-visual contributions to the detection of information about minimum walking speed.Keywords
Funding Information
- National Institutes of Health (1R01EY019317)
- National Science Foundation (BCS 0545141)
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