Can I reach that? Blind reaching as an accurate measure of estimated reachable distance

Judgments of one's reach extent have been repeatedly found to be overestimated by about 10%. In 3 studies, a new dependent measure was employed in which participants viewed targets, closed their eyes, and then touched the location of the remembered target or pointed to its location if out of reach. This experimental paradigm yielded a much smaller but still present bias to over-estimate by about 2%. In addition, participants often reached for and touched target locations that were actually out of reach in a manner indicative of the typical 10% over-estimation bias. Surprisingly, participant response accuracy improved significantly and consistently across experimental trials even without visual or tactile feedback. This suggests that the proprioceptive information about the arm in space coupled with the remembered visual information about target location were sufficient to facilitate learning.