Abstract
We investigate the influence of perceived displacement of moving agent-like stimuli on the performance in dynamic interactive tasks. In order to reliably measure perceived displacement we utilize multiple tasks with different task demands. The perceived center of an agent's body is displaced in the direction in which the agent is facing and this perceived displacement is larger than the theoretical position of the center of mass would predict. Furthermore, the displacement in the explicit judgment is dissociated from the displacement obtained by the implicit measures. By manipulating the location of the pivot point, we show that it is not necessary to postulate orientation as an additional cue utilized by perception, as has been suggested by earlier studies. These studies showed that the agent's orientation influences the detection of chasing motion and the detection-related performance in interactive tasks. This influence has been labeled wolfpack effect. In one of the demonstrations of the wolfpack effect participants control a green circle on a display with a computer mouse. It has been shown that participants avoid display areas with agents pointing toward the green circle. Participants do so in favor of areas where the agents point in the direction perpendicular to the circle. We show that this avoidance behavior arises because the agent's pivot point selected by the earlier studies is different from where people locate the center of agent's body. As a consequence, the nominal rotation confounds rotation and translation. We show that the avoidance behavior disappears once the pivot point is set to the center of agent's body.
Highlights
Gao and Scholl demonstrated (Gao et al, 2009, 2010; Gao and Scholl, 2011) that certain movement cues influence the detection of chasing motion and the performance in interactive tasks
By adjusting the rotation while keeping the position/trajectory of the agents constant, the authors were able to study orientation independent of other motion cues. They found that in visual scenarios where multiple agents were oriented toward a common chasee, this impeded participant’s performance as compared to control conditions where the agents’ orientation pointed 90 degrees relative to the chasee’s position. In their Experiment 21, the participants controlled a green circle with a computer mouse and tried to avoid contact with a white circle which chased the green circle
In support of our second claim we have shown that with the darts, the performance in the Leave-Me-Alone task (LMA) task changes if we shift the pivot
Summary
Gao and Scholl demonstrated (Gao et al, 2009, 2010; Gao and Scholl, 2011) that certain movement cues influence the detection of chasing motion and the performance in interactive tasks. The design and results were similar to that of Experiment 3a, except that instead of darts the participant tried to avoid white circles whose orientation was determined by the direction of two red dots (“eyes,” see e.g., Figure 7 for an example) We refer to these stimuli as bugs. In the current study we investigate the influence of perceived displacement of the center of an agent’s body on participant’s performance in the interactive tasks from Gao et al (2010). The perceived center of the dart and the bug stimuli is displaced away from the nominal pivot used by Gao et al (2010) in the direction of the agent’s nose/eyes. This allows us to better identify the factors influencing the displacement than studies that focus on a single measure
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