Stefanucci Jeanine K, Geuss Michael N
Department of Psychology, The College of William & Mary, PO Box 8795, Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795, USA.
Perception. 2009;38(12):1782-95. doi: 10.1068/p6437.
Previous research has shown that changes to the body can influence the perception of distances in near space (Witt et al, 2005 Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 31 880-888). In this paper, we question whether changes to the body can also influence the perception of extents in extrapersonal space, namely the perception of aperture widths. In experiment 1, broad-shouldered participants visually estimated the size of apertures to be smaller than narrow-shouldered participants. In experiment 2, we questioned whether changes to the body, which included holding a large object, wearing a large object, or simply holding out the arms would influence perceived width. Surprisingly, we found that only when participants' hands were widened was extrapersonal space rescaled. In experiment 3, we explored the boundaries of the effect observed in experiment 2 by asking participants to hold their arms at four different positions in order to determine the arm width at which apertures appeared smaller. We found that arm positions that were larger than the shoulder width made apertures appear smaller. The results suggest that dimensions of the body play a role in the scaling of environmental parameters in extrapersonal space.
先前的研究表明，身体的变化会影响对近空间中距离的感知（维特等人，《实验心理学杂志：人类感知与表现》，2005年，第31卷，第880 - 888页）。在本文中，我们质疑身体的变化是否也会影响对个人空间外范围的感知，即对孔径宽度的感知。在实验1中，肩膀宽阔的参与者视觉估计的孔径大小比肩膀狭窄的参与者要小。在实验2中，我们探究了身体的变化，包括手持一个大物体、穿戴一个大物体或仅仅伸出双臂，是否会影响感知宽度。令人惊讶的是，我们发现只有当参与者双手张开时，个人空间外的空间才会重新调整比例。在实验3中，我们通过要求参与者将手臂保持在四个不同位置来探索实验2中观察到的效应的边界，以确定在何种手臂宽度下孔径看起来更小。我们发现，大于肩膀宽度的手臂位置会使孔径看起来更小。结果表明，身体尺寸在个人空间外空间环境参数的缩放中起作用。
