Research Design Connection: Looking and Seeing

by Sally Augustin, Ph.D. | April 2nd, 2018

The information we take in with our eyes may not be processed in an entirely objective way. A research team lead by Witt of Colorado State University has, over approximately the last decade, published studies indicating that “vision can change as a function of action…Among Witt’s best-known experiments: When baseball players are hitting better, they see the ball as bigger. When someone lacks fitness or is carrying a heavy backpack, they see a hill as steeper.” In a paper in Psychological Science, Witt, Tenhundfeld and Tymoski share that they asked participants in a new study to play “a game very much like Pong, a ball bounces across a screen, and participants use a joystick to block the ball with a paddle of varying sizes…the ‘Pong effect’ is when the ball appears faster when the paddle is smaller, even though the speed remains unchanged. The Pong effect supports Witt’s hypotheses about actions influencing …