Historically, the bodily senses have often been regarded as impeccable sources of spatial information and as being the teacher of vision. Here, the authors report that the haptic perception of slope by means of the foot is greatly exaggerated. The exaggeration is present in verbal as well as proprioceptive judgments. It is shown that this…

Classical cognitive accounts of verbal short-term memory (STM) invoke an abstract, phonological level of representation which, although it may be derived differently via different modalities, is itself amodal. Key evidence for this view is that serial recall of phonologically similar verbal items (e.g., the letter sounds "b",…

Bingham, Schmidt, & Rosenblum, (1989) showed that people are able to select, by hefting balls, the optimal weight for each size ball to be thrown farthest. We now investigate function learning and smart mechanisms as hypotheses about how this affordance is perceived. Twenty-four unskilled adult throwers learned to throw by practicing with a subset…

Perceptual systems must learn to explore and to use the resulting information to hone performance. Optimal performance depends on using information available at many time scales, from the near instantaneous values of variables underlying perception (i.e., detection), to longer term information about appropriate scaling (i.e., calibration), to yet…

G. P. Bingham, R. C. Schmidt, and L. D. Rosenblum (1989) found that, by hefting objects of different sizes and weights, people could choose the optimal weight in each size for throwing to a maximum distance. In Experiment 1, the authors replicated this result. G. P. Bingham et al. hypothesized that hefting is a smart mechanism that allows objects…

D. R. Proffitt and colleagues (e. g., D. R. Proffitt, J. Stefanucci, T. Banton, & W. Epstein, 2003) have suggested that objects appear farther away if more effort is required to act upon them (e.g., by having to throw a ball). The authors attempted to replicate several findings supporting this view but found no effort-related effects in a variety…

Two experiments tested the effects of crawling-onset age, amount of crawling experience, and testing age on avoidance of the deep side of a visual cliff apparatus by human infants. Crawling-onset age disciminated between infants because crawling during the tactile phase interferes with later visual control of locomotion. (Author/RD)

Previous research has demonstrated that compensatory movements for changes in visuomotor coupling often are not consciously detected. But what factors affect the conscious detection of such changes? This issue was addressed in 4 experiments. Participants carried out a drawing task in which the relative velocity between the actual movement and its…

This study investigated the role that visual tracking plays in coupling rhythmic limb movements to an environmental rhythm. Two experiments were conducted in which participants swung a hand-held pendulum while tracking an oscillating stimulus or while keeping their eyes fixed on a stationary location directly above an oscillating stimulus. It…