Rrd. Oudejans et al., THE RELEVANCE OF ACTION IN PERCEIVING AFFORDANCES - PERCEPTION OF CATCHABLENESS OF FLY BALLS, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, 22(4), 1996, pp. 879-891
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.