Seeing and doing: Ability to act moderates orientation effects in object perception

Abstract

We investigated whether the impact of an object's orientation on a perceiver's actions (an orientation effect) is moderated by the perceiver's ability to act on the object in question. To do this, we manipulated the physical location of presented objects (Experiment 1) and the perceiver's action capacity (Experiment 2). Regardless of the physical distance of the object, manual responses were sensitive to the object's orientation (the orientation effect) when the object was within the participant's action range but not when the object was outside of the action range. These results support an embodied view of object perception and shed light on peripersonal space representation.

Keywords:

• Embodied cognition
• Object perception
• Peripersonal space
• Action
• Tool

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by National Science Foundation (NSF) Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), SBE 0541957, to Sian L. Beilock.

Notes

¹ The significant Hand × Handle interaction was not qualified by the timing of the prompt, cup rotation direction, or rotation speed in the current study. Thus, data across these factors were collapsed in subsequent analyses.

² Although significant, one might notice that our effects are somewhat small (i.e., actable condition: left hand, 8.1 ms; right hand, 6.9 ms; average, 7.5 ms). Nevertheless, the size of the orientation effect varies depending on experimental set-ups (Fischer & Dahl, 2007), and our effect size is common in the literature (around 5 ms, Experiment 1, Symes, Ellis, & Tucker, 2005; 6.5 ms, Experiment 2, Symes et al., 2007).