The role of movement variability and action experience in the perceptual judgement of passability

Perception and action are tightly coupled and previous studies have demonstrated that action experience can improve perceptual judgement. We investigated whether this improvement in perceptual judgement could be attributed to knowledge regarding movement variability being gained during action experience. Fifteen adults made perceptual judgments regarding the passability of a series of aperture sizes. These judgements were made both before and after walking through the same set of apertures (action experience). When considering the group as a whole perceptual judgement did not change after action experience. However, when splitting the group into those with low and high pre-action perceptual judgements, only those with low perceptual judgements showed an improvement in perceptual judgement following action experience and this could in part be explained by movement variability during the approach. These data demonstrate that action informs perception and that this allows adults to account for movement variability when making perceptual judgements regarding action capabilities