Authors: AnneMarie Brouwer Tom Middelburg Jeroen B J Smeets Eli Brenner
Publish Date: 2003/07/30
Volume: 152, Issue: 3, Pages: 368-375
Abstract
Previous work has indicated that people do not use their judgment of a targets speed to determine where to hit it Instead they use their judgment of the targets changing position and an expected speed based on the speed of previous targets In the present study we investigate whether people also ignore the targets apparent direction of motion and use the targets changing position and an expected direction of motion instead Subjects hit targets that moved in slightly different directions across a screen Sometimes the targets disappeared after 150 ms long before the subjects could reach the screen This prevented subjects from using the targets changing position to adjust their movements making it possible to evaluate whether subjects were relying on the perceived or an expected average direction to guide their movements The background moved perpendicular to the average direction of motion in some trials This influences the targets perceived direction of motion while leaving its perceived position unaffected When the background was stationary subjects hit disappearing targets along their trajectory just as they hit ones that remained visible Moving the background affected the direction in which subjects started to move their hand in accordance with the illusory change in direction of target motion If the target disappeared this resulted in a hit that was systematically off the targets trajectory If the target remained visible subjects corrected their initial error Presumably they did so on the basis of information about the targets changing position because if the target disappeared they did not correct the error We conclude that people do use the targets perceived direction of motion to determine where to hit it Thus the perceived direction of motion is treated differently than the perceived speed This suggests that the motion of an object is not broken down into speed components in different directions but that speed and direction are perceived and used separately
Keywords: