The influence of anxiety on action-specific perception

Abstract

Recent empirical research suggests that performance modulates perception. For example, baseball players judge the ball to be bigger when performing well as compared to when performing less successfully. Yet, the underlying processes that mediate the emergence of action-specific effects on perception are still largely unknown. To this end, we aimed to examine the impact of anxiety on the action-specific influence on perception as anxiety has been shown to affect both performance and perception. Thirty participants threw darts at a circle-shaped target and were then asked to judge the size of the target. The task was performed under conditions of low and high anxiety. Results replicated previously reported action-specific effects on perception under levels of low anxiety. However, these effects vanished in the high anxiety condition. Results seem to suggest that anxiety has a direct influence on the relation between performance and perception. Attentional control theory is discussed to explain the current findings.

Keywords:

• performance
• size perception
• anxiety
• attention

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Bita Lotfaliei for her support in collecting the data.

Notes

1. The radial errors of throws that missed the board area (224 of 1440 throws) were set to and computed as throws with a radial error of 21 cm as this is the distance between center of the target and the border of the covering sheet (42 cm×42 cm). We thus chose the minimal distance from the target that a complete miss could have landed. Note that this provides an underestimation of the absolute radial errors.