Abstract
Perception and action are tightly coupled. However, there is still little recognition of how individual motor constraints impact perception in everyday life. Here we asked whether and how the motor slowing that accompanies aging influences the sense of visual speed. Ninety-four participants aged between 18 and 90 judged the natural speed of video clips reproducing real human or physical motion (SoS, Sense-of-Speed adjustment task). They also performed a finger tapping task and a visual search task, which estimated their motor speed and visuospatial attention speed, respectively. Remarkably, aged people judged videos to be too slow (speed underestimation), as compared to younger people: the Point of Subjective Equality (PSE), which estimated the speed bias in the SoS task, was +4% in young adults (<40), +12% in old adults (40–70) and +16% in elders. On average, PSE increased with age at a rate of 0.2% per year, with perceptual precision, adjustment rate, and completion time progressively worsening. Crucially, low motor speed, but not low attentional speed, turned out to be the key predictor of video speed underestimation. These findings suggest the existence of a counterintuitive compensatory coupling between action and perception in judging dynamic scenes, an effect that becomes particularly germane during aging.
Highlights
There is increasing recognition of the reciprocal links between action and perception at both neural and behavioral levels (e.g., Cattaneo and Rizzolatti, 2009; Gallese et al, 2009)
We have recently shown that young adults are very tolerant to video clips reproduced at a speed different from the original speed
We found the same pattern of results, namely, that maximal motor speed but not relaxed motor speed was a significant predictor of the final video speed judgment, in the latter case there was no evidence of a trade-off between relaxed motor speed and age
Summary
There is increasing recognition of the reciprocal links between action and perception at both neural and behavioral levels (e.g., Cattaneo and Rizzolatti, 2009; Gallese et al, 2009). It is not too clear how individual motor characteristics or constraints impact on perception in everyday life, except perhaps for special populations such as for example sport professionals or people with motor impairments or distinctive movement abilities (Sgouramani and Vatakis, 2014; Bassolino et al, 2015; Voyer and Jansen, 2017; Quarona et al, 2020). Studying aging from the perspective of motion perception seems to be a promising approach (Billino and Pilz, 2019). To this aim, simple stimuli and tasks targeting low-level visual mechanisms have been typically used (e.g., speed and direction discrimination)
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