Does more exploration occur around the perceived boundary when all exploratory behaviors can occur at all distances?

Date

2021-12

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Abstract

People perform exploratory behaviors to generate information about their affordances, i.e., the actions they can perform in that environment. Further, people explore more around their perceived boundary, i.e., the boundary at which they perceive an action changes from being possible to being impossible, than farther from that boundary. Researchers argued that people explore more around the perceived boundary because people use additional exploratory behaviors near this boundary to gain additional information about their affordances. However, studies that tested that possibility used tasks that encouraged people to exhibit one form of exploration before additional forms of exploration, which could be why their findings supported that people use additional exploratory behaviors near the perceived boundary. The current research addressed this limitation by having participants judge whether they could execute an arm-only reach because all exploration for this task can be exhibited at the same time and at the start of a trial. Therefore, this task addresses the limitation of prior studies. If people used more exploratory behaviors near the perceived boundary than far from it while performing this task, then this finding suggests prior studies’ conclusion that people use more exploratory behaviors near the perceived boundary was not due to those studies’ limitation. Experiment 1 determined people explore for a longer time near the perceived boundary than far from it when judging whether they can execute an arm-only reach. This result replicated past findings and extended those findings to a previously unstudied affordance task. Experiment 2 confirmed the results of Experiment 1 and found trends that could suggest people use different exploratory behaviors near the perceived boundary compared to far from this boundary. These trends follow the pattern that would support the argument that people use additional exploratory behaviors near the perceived boundary. However, these trends could also be due to a small restriction effect. A small restriction effect is not likely to affect perception of one’s abilities far from the perceived boundary. This could lead to results that suggest people did not use head or arm movements far from the perceived boundary when they actually did. This research has implications for studies of exploration, the co-specificity hypothesis, assembly lines, and human-robot interaction.

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Keywords

Affordance Perception, Exploration, Perceived Boundary, Response Time, Percent Accuracy

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