Amelioration of axis-aligned motion bias for active versus stationary judgments of bilaterally symmetric moving shapes' final destinations

Abstract

Recent research confirms that observers' judgments of projected final destinations of axis-trajectory misaligned moving figures are biased in the direction of primary axis deviation from trajectory, a phenomenon we named the axis-aligned motion (AAM) bias. The present study tests whether this bias occurs in a large, immersive mixed-reality environment that enables active (mobile) responses in making judgments of shapes' destinations. Like Morikawa (1999), we found that accuracy depended on axis-trajectory alignment and that there was a correspondence between final destination judgment error and the direction of axial deviation from the trajectory. Extending prior work, we found that comobile judgments were significantly more accurate than stationary ones for symmetric moving shapes, regardless of axial deviation, but only marginally so for asymmetric shapes. We conclude that our findings are ecologically consistent and that AAM is a natural regularity for which people have acquired a complementary perceptual-cognitive attunement: the AAM bias. © 2009 The Psychonomic Society, Inc.