THE RELEVANCE OF ACTION IN PERCEIVING AFFORDANCES - PERCEPTION OF CATCHABLENESS OF FLY BALLS

The catchableness of a fly ball depends on whether the catcher can get to the ball in time; accurate judgments of catchableness must reflect both spatial and temporal aspects. Two experiments examined the perce ption of catchableness under conditions of restricted information pick up. Experiment 1 compared perceptual judgments with actual catching an d revealed that stationary observers are poor perceivers of catchablen ess, as would be expected by the lack of information about running cap abilities. In Experiment 2, participants saw the Ist part of ball traj ectories before their vision was occluded. In 1 condition, they starte d to run (as if to catch the ball) before occlusion; in another, they remained stationary. Moving judgments were better than stationary judg ments. This supports the idea that perceiving affordances that depend on kinematic, rather than merely geometric, body characteristics may r equire the relevant action to be performed.