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Manual estimations of functionally graspable target objects adhere to Weber’s law

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Abstract

The manual estimation task requires that participants separate the distance between their thumb and forefinger until they perceive it to match the size of a target object. Ganel and colleagues (Curr Biol 18:R599–R601, 2008a) demonstrated that manual estimations yield just-noticeable-difference (JND) scores that linearly increased with increasing target object size; that is, responses adhered to Weber’s law and thus evince response mediation via relative and perception-based visual information. In turn, more recent work has reported that the size of a target object influences whether JNDs provide a reliable metric for evaluating the nature of the visual information supporting manual estimations. In particular, Bruno et al. (Neuropsychologia 91:327–334, 2016) reported that JNDs for ‘large’ target objects (i.e., 80 and 120 mm) violate Weber’s law due to biomechanical limits in aperture opening. It is, however, important to recognize that the absolute size of the ‘large’ target objects employed by Bruno et al. may have exceeded some participants’ functional aperture separation and resulted in a biomechanical strategy serving as the only viable response mode. Hence, the present investigation employed a manual estimation task wherein target object sizes were proportionately matched to decile increments (i.e., 10, 20, …, 70 and 80%) of individual participants’ maximal aperture separation. Results showed that JNDs increased linearly with increasing target object size. Accordingly, we propose that manual estimations of target objects within a functionally ‘graspable’ range adhere to Weber’s law and are mediated via relative and perception-based visual information.

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Notes

  1. Bruno et al. (2016) do not employ the term just-noticeable-difference (i.e., JND); rather, the authors employ the term ‘variable error’. For consistency, and given the findings of the present work, we use JND as a standard term to reflect trial-to-trial variability in peak grip aperture.

  2. As defined by Pheasant (1986), functional aperture separation is the distance at which an individual can grasp a flat wooden board with the tips of the thumb and ring finger to effectively lift, and is between 10 and 15% of an individual’s maximum aperture separation.

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Acknowledgements

Supported by a Discovery Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Faculty Scholar and Major Academic Development Fund Awards from the University of Western Ontario.

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Correspondence to Matthew Heath.

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Heath, M., Manzone, J. Manual estimations of functionally graspable target objects adhere to Weber’s law. Exp Brain Res 235, 1701–1707 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-017-4913-8

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