Elsevier

Vision Research

Volume 51, Issue 17, 1 September 2011, Pages 1941-1948
Vision Research

Visually and memory-guided grasping: Aperture shaping exhibits a time-dependent scaling to Weber’s law

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Abstract

The ‘just noticeable difference’ (JND) represents the minimum amount by which a stimulus must change to produce a noticeable variation in one’s perceptual experience and is related to initial stimulus magnitude (i.e., Weber’s law). The goal of the present study was to determine whether aperture shaping for visually derived and memory-guided grasping elicit a temporally dependent or temporally independent adherence to Weber’s law. Participants were instructed to grasp differently sized objects (20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 mm) in conditions wherein vision of the grasping environment was available throughout the response (i.e., closed-loop), when occluded at movement onset (i.e., open-loop), and when occluded for a brief (i.e., 0 ms) or longer (i.e., 2000 ms) delay in advance of movement onset. Within-participant standard deviations of grip aperture (i.e., the JNDs) computed at decile increments of normalized grasping time were used to determine participant’s sensitivity to detecting changes in object size. Results showed that JNDs increased linearly with increasing object size from 10% to 40% of grasping time; that is, the trial-to-trial stability (i.e., visuomotor certainty) of grip aperture (i.e., the comparator) decreased with increasing object size (i.e., the initial stimulus). However, a null JND/object size scaling was observed during the middle and late stages of the response (i.e., >50% of grasping time). Most notably, the temporal relationship between JNDs and object size scaling was similar across the different visual conditions used here. Thus, our results provide evidence that aperture shaping elicits a time-dependent early, but not late, adherence to the psychophysical principles of Weber’s law.

Highlights

► The principle of Weber’s law was used to examine grip aperture shaping during visually derived and memory-guided actions. ► Just noticeable difference (JNDs) magnitudes were computed for differently sized objects. ► JNDs exhibited an early, but not late, scaling to object size in each visual condition. ► Aperture shaping is subject to a time-dependent adherence to Weber’s law.

Keywords

Action
Grasping
Perception
Memory
Weber’s law

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