Abstract
Athletes often give more accurate estimates of egocentric distance along the ground than do non-athletes. To explore whether cognitive calibration was accompanied by perceptual change, athletes and non-athletes made verbal height and distance estimates and also did a perceptual matching task between perceived egocentric distances and frontal vertical extents. Both groups were well calibrated for height estimation for poles viewed frontally, but athletes were much better calibrated at estimating longer egocentric distances (which are systematically underestimated by non-athletes). Athletes were more likely to have learned specific units of ground distance from relevant sports contexts. Both groups reported using human height as a metric for vertical extent. For non-athletes, verbal underestimation of ground distance corresponded to predictions based on perceptual matches between egocentric distances and vertical extents in conjunction with human-height-based verbal estimates of vertical extents. For athletes, the verbal scaling of egocentric distances of 10 m or more was more accurate and was not predicted by their egocentric distance matches to vertical extents.
Highlights
Do athletes see distances and heights differently than non-athletes? Do they judge them differently? Many forms of athletic competition take place in highly standardized spatial settings
The combination of experiential knowledge of standardized heights and distances with explicit knowledge of their nominal dimensions may provide a basis for cognitive calibration of distance and height estimation among athletes that is not afforded to most adults
It has typically been found that egocentric ground distances are underestimated by verbal report, and recently it has been shown that this verbal underestimation of egocentric distance along the ground can be captured by spatial matching tasks (Li et al 2011)
Summary
Do athletes see distances and heights differently than non-athletes? Do they judge them differently? Many forms of athletic competition take place in highly standardized spatial settings. Li et al (2011) tested the gaze declination model of egocentric distance underestimation using a perceptual matching task in which participants adjusted their distance from a vertical pole until they believed that their distance matched the height of the pole They conducted an outdoor version of the study as well as a version in an immersive virtual environment. Reviews of studies of verbal estimation of distance generally show that participants’ egocentric distance estimates are proportional to distance (when fit with a power function, they have an exponent very close to 1), but that verbal reports tend to underestimate distance by a factor between 0.7 and 0.9 (eg, Da Silva 1985; Loomis and Philbeck 2008) This kind of underestimation of distance is consistent with the gaze declination model and with matches between frontal vertical extents and egocentric distances. Because performance on action measures such as walking and throwing is normally quite good, we expected that biases in action measures and perceptual matching tasks might not differ as a function of athletic experience
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