ERIC Number: EJ860104
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2009-Aug
Pages: 14
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0096-1523
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Available Date: N/A
The Various Perceptions of Distance: An Alternative View of How Effort Affects Distance Judgments
Woods, Adam J.; Philbeck, John W.; Danoff, Jerome V.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, v35 n4 p1104-1117 Aug 2009
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 of conditions differing in environment, type of effort, and intention to act. Although they did find an effect of effort on verbal reports when participants were instructed to take into account nonvisual (cognitive) factors, no effort-related effect was found under apparent- and objective-distance instruction types. The authors' interpretation is that in the paradigms tested, effort manipulations are prone to influencing response calibration because they encourage participants to take nonperceptual connotations of distance into account while leaving perceived distance itself unaffected. This in no way rules out the possibility that effort influences perception in other contexts, but it does focus attention on the role of response calibration in any verbal distance estimation task. (Contains 3 tables, 4 figures and 1 footnote.)
Descriptors: Cognitive Development, Spatial Ability, Visual Perception, Dimensional Preference, Multivariate Analysis, Psychomotor Skills, Educational Experiments, Perceptual Motor Learning, Kinetics, Experimental Psychology
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
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Audience: N/A
Language: English
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