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 perception of catchableness under conditions of restricted information pickup. Experiment 1 compared perceptual judgments with actual catching and revealed that stationary observers are poor perceivers of catchableness, as would be expected by the lack of information about running capabilities. In Experiment 2, participants saw the Ist part of ball trajectories before their vision was occluded. In 1 condition, they started to run (as if to catch the ball) before occlusion; in another, they remained stationary. Moving judgments were better than stationary judgments. This supports the idea that perceiving affordances that depend on kinematic, rather than merely geometric, body characteristics may require the relevant action to be performed.