Haptically linked dyads: are two motor-control systems better than one?
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Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Peter M Vishton.
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Six experiments compared the Gestalt processing that mediates infant reaching and looking behaviors. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the positioning and timing of 8- and 9-month-olds' reaching was influenced by remembered relative motion. Experiment 2 suggested that a visible gap, without this relative motion, was not sufficient to produce these effects. Experiment 3 found that 6- and 7-month-olds required both remembered relative motion and a continuously visible gap to affect reaching; when two separate objects were placed adjacent to one another, they were treated as though they were connected. Experiments 4 and 5, using a looking time measure, identified a dissociation between looking and reaching performance. In Experiment 6, 6- and 7-month-olds' reaching was influenced when display parts differed in shape and color. In these experiments, Gestalt processing for looking was more influenced by remembered information than was Gestalt processing for reaching. For reaching, a low weighting of separation cues was also apparent.
Many studies have suggested that visually-guided action is largely immune to the effects of several pictorial illusions that strongly influence perceptual judgments. The judgments in these experiments, however, have usually involved comparisons of multiple elements within a display, whereas the visually-guided actions have typically involved a pincer grip directed to only one display element. The three experiments presented here assess the influence of this confound on the perception versus action illusion dissociation. In general, the studies suggest (a) that the confound affects perceptual judgment but not grasping or manual estimation, and (b) that difficult visuomotor tasks are more affected by the Ebbinghaus illusion than easier tasks. In Experiment 1, participants reached for or made judgments about plastic disks placed in the center of the Ebbinghaus illusion display. Some participants reached for or made judgments about only the disk on the right, whereas others reached for or judged both disks simultaneously. A large effect of the illusion was found for grasping and comparative judgment, but not for manual estimation or metric judgment. In Experiment 2, the disks were elevated slightly to make gripping the targets easier, and the effects of the illusion on grasping were greatly reduced. For Experiment 3, participants performed the manual estimation task while the hands were placed in view, on the surface of the table, and the effects of the illusion were significantly increased. Taken together, the experiments indicate that task difficulty and hand visibility affect whether a task will be influenced by pictorial illusions or not. One- and two-handed grasping seem to be affected approximately equally.