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The Müller-Lyer illusion affects the planning and control of manual aiming movements

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Abstract

Participants made perceptual judgments about the length of, and manual aiming movements to the opposite end of, formerly visible Müller-Lyer stimuli. The Müller-Lyer illusion affected both perceptual judgments and aiming amplitude. Manipulations of stimulus duration (10 ms or 3,000 ms) and memory delay length (10 ms or 3,000 ms) had no impact on the illusory effect. Aiming movements executed with vision of the hand were less affected by the illusion than movements executed without vision of the hand. The effect of the illusion on aiming amplitude remained the same between peak velocity and the end of the movement even though participants were engaged in on-line control between peak deceleration and the end of the movement. This latter finding was counter to the predictions of a hypothesis (Glover 2002) stating that illusions should only affect the early (planning) stages of movement and not the late (control) stages of movement. We conclude that a single visual representation is used for perception, motor planning, and motor control.

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Notes

  1. The purpose of the pattern mask was to prevent continued visual processing of the stimulus following the exposure period.

  2. Khan et al. (2003) have demonstrated that decreases in spatial variability do not occur between peak deceleration and the end of the movement if participants have insufficient time or opportunity to use on-line feedback. Thus the changes in variability over the course of the trajectory do not appear to be an artifact of data acquisition or reduction procedures.

  3. Although the analysis of the relative amplitudes revealed no change in the illusion-induced bias from early to late kinematic landmarks, a similar analysis of absolute amplitudes (i.e., not scaled by tail-less amplitudes) revealed an increase in the impact of the illusion at the end of the movement relative to early kinematic landmarks.

  4. Although the aiming movements in the current study were executed rapidly, there was still ample time for feedback utilization (Elliott and Allard 1985; Zelaznik et al. 1983), as is evidenced by the variable and constant error advantages associated with visual feedback availability in Experiment 2.

  5. Other results that are problematic for the planning-control hypothesis were reported by Proteau and Masson (1997) and Brenner and Smeets (1997), who found that a perturbation of the visual background underlying a target had a significant effect on target-directed accuracy, even though the perturbation was not introduced until after a movement was initiated. In other words, visual perceptual information was available to control processes.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canada Research Chair program. We thank John Moroz for technical support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, N1G 2W1, Canada

    Daniel V. Meegan

  2. Department of Kinesiology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada

    Cheryl M. Glazebrook, Victoria P. Dhillon, Luc Tremblay, Timothy N. Welsh & Digby Elliott

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  1. Daniel V. Meegan
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  2. Cheryl M. Glazebrook
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  3. Victoria P. Dhillon
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Correspondence to Daniel V. Meegan.

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Meegan, D.V., Glazebrook, C.M., Dhillon, V.P. et al. The Müller-Lyer illusion affects the planning and control of manual aiming movements. Exp Brain Res 155, 37–47 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-003-1702-3

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