Graduation Term

Summer 2025

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Department of Psychology

Committee Chair

Jeffrey Wagman

Committee Member

Alen Hajnal

Committee Member

Allison Nguyen

Abstract

People use different exploratory movements to perceive different properties of a handheld object and different exploratory wielding movements to perceive different properties of a wielded object. We investigated whether people use different exploratory probing movements to perceive different properties of a surface. Participants probed a surface and attempted to perceive either an affordance (whether they could stand on that surface) or a geometric property (angle of inclination) of that surface. Perceived angle was nearly perfectly correlated with (but imperfectly scaled to) surface angle. The perceived boundary between surfaces that could be stood on and those that could not be stood on closely matched the actual boundary on this behavior. With respect to the exploratory probing movements, mixed effects modeling showed that neither mean accelerations of probing movements nor variability of accelerations of probing movements predicted perceived angle. However, the coefficient of variation of probing movements tended to decrease as surface inclination increased, and the value of ETC (Effort-to-compress) increased as angle of inclination increased.

Access Type

Thesis-Open Access

DOI

https://doi.org/10.30707/ETD.1763755358.916177

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