Awareness Is Not a Necessary Characteristic of a Perceptual Effect

Abstract

Golf holes look larger to golfers who are playing better than others, and hills look steeper to people who are fatigued from a long run—or so claims the action-specific account of perception. According to this account, spatial perception of slant, distance, and size is influenced by the perceiver’s ability to perform actions such as walking, throwing, or grasping. This claim is based on empirical findings that observers report hills as steeper, distances as farther, and objects as smaller when they are less capable of acting on the objects. Recently, Firestone (2013) challenged the claim that these reports reflect genuine differences in perception. One argument he levied against a perceptual interpretation is that people are not aware of these perceptual differences related to action, and they should be. Here, I argue that awareness is not a necessary condition for an effect to be perceptual, as evidenced by a lack of awareness in the case of a classic visual illusion. However, to make a strong claim for genuine effects in perception, the action-specific account must specify a perceptual mechanism, and it has yet to do so.