Learning by doing: action performance facilitates affordance perception

Abstract

We investigated the effect of action performance on perceptual judgments by evaluating accuracy in judging whether doorways allowed passage. Participants made judgments either before or after walking through doorways of varying widths. Participants in the action-first group benefited from action feedback and made more accurate judgments compared to a perception-first group that judged doorways before walking through them. Action feedback aided perceptual judgments by facilitating scaling to body dimensions: Judgments in the action-first group were strongly related to height, weight, and torso size, whereas judgments in the perception-first group were not.