Running Subjects

The week after Spring Break was a marathon of running subjects. We ran 16 subjects in 2 days and had the results the next day.
The purpose of this experiment was to investigate the importance of visual and motor feedback when making judgments about an action. In order to do learn about these types of feedback, we placed our participants into the role of both an actor and an observer. In both roles, the subject was 4 meters behind an avatar in the virtual environment; as an actor this avatar's movements were mapped to the subject's own movements and as an observer the avatar's movements were mapped to those of a helper who was in the lab with me. In the actor role, the subject watched themselves throw a ball which disappeared after release and then upon landing reappeared, along with another ball which was displaced to appear either closer or further from the subject than the actual landing point of the ball. The subject then had to respond with a 'further' or 'closer' response, indicating which ball they believed to be the one that had been thrown. The observer role was very similar, except that the lab assistant threw the ball as opposed to the subjects themselves.
As an actor the participant had both the visual information from watching themselves throw, as well as the motor feedback from performing the action. The observer, on the other hand, had only the visual information from the assistant's body movements.
After looking at the results, we found no significant effect of viewpoint, meaning that our subjects were able to perform the task equally as well without motor information as they were with it. This result leads us to believe that visual information is enough and that any addition information is not enough to improve our perception.