The Effect of Action on Perception and Cognition

打得好的棒球运动员宣称球看起来像葡萄柚一样大。禁区内的网球运动员说，球似乎在慢动作地移动。这两个例子都在实验中被证实是一种心理现实，这表明一个人所看到的可能不是世界的真实物理状态，而是可能因行为而产生偏见。就运动员而言，这种误解可能本身就很有趣，但不太可能对人们的生活产生重大影响。相比之下，飞行员对跑道大小的判断错误、司机对汽车距离的判断错误、医生对肿瘤大小的判断错误都令人担忧。考虑到视觉在日常生活中的重要作用，尤其是与安全相关的作用，理解这一基本能力背后的过程是至关重要的。该研究项目旨在探索人们的视觉感知何时以及如何受到行为的影响。此外，该研究项目还为几名研究生和数十名本科生的教育和培训做出了贡献。这些学生还接受培训，学习如何与持相反观点的科学家一起工作，这一过程被称为对抗性合作。尽管这类工作有其自身的挑战，但科学可能会从这种合作中受益。有许多重要而微妙的方式，行动可能导致错误的感知。当飞行员表现不佳、疲劳或饥饿时，或者在大风或强降雨等恶劣环境下，机场跑道可能会显得更小。该研究项目考察了以下因素对行动相关效果的潜在影响：1)任务的能量需求，2)任务的难度，以及3)任务是否可行。在此过程中，该研究项目将揭示感知容易受到明显由行为引起的错误的界限。进行这项研究的科学家们正在考虑，在多大程度上，任何影响都是实验环境的人工产物，而不是影响感知者在现实世界中如何看待周围环境的真正影响。这是确保所研究的效果对日常生活产生影响的关键一步。事实上，许多实验放弃了传统的实验室设置，探索在真实环境和使用虚拟现实模拟真实世界的环境中，行为如何影响感知。

Baseball players who are hitting well proclaim that the ball looks as big as a grapefruit. Tennis players in the zone remark that the ball seems to move in slow motion. These examples, both of which have been confirmed in experiments as a psychological reality, suggest that what a person sees may not be the true, physical state of the world but rather can be biased by action. In the case of athletes, such misperceptions may be inherently interesting, but are unlikely to have a major impact on people's lives. In contrast, similar errors in perception by airplane pilots of runway size, drivers of car distances, or doctors of tumor size are quite concerning. Given the important role of vision in daily life and especially as it relates to safety, it is critical to understand the processes underlying this fundamental ability of the mind. The research project is designed to explore when and how people's visual perception is biased by action. In addition, the research project contributes to the education and training of several graduate students and dozens of undergraduate students. These students are also being trained on how to work alongside scientists with opposing views through a process known as adversarial collaboration. Although this kind of work presents its own challenges, the science is likely to benefit from such collaborations.There are many important and nuanced ways that action could give rise to errors in perception. Airport runways could appear smaller when the airline pilot is not performing well, fatigued, or hungry, or when environmental conditions are poor such as high winds or strong rainfall. The research project examines the potential impact on vision of action-related effects due to 1) energetic demands of the task, 2) difficulty of the task, and 3) whether or not a task is even possible. In doing so, the research project will uncover the boundaries for which perception is prone to errors explicitly caused by action. The scientists conducting the research are considering the extent to which any effects are artifacts of the experimental setting, as opposed to genuine effects on perception that would impact how perceivers see the surrounding environment in the real world. This is a critical step for ensuring that the studied effects will have implications for daily life. Indeed, many of the experiments forgo traditional laboratory settings to explore how action influences perception in both real environments and in environments that simulate the real world using virtual reality.