Performance and perception are not related in Fitts's Law

Abstract

Previously we reported an experiment that demonstrated that individual differences in Fitts's Law performance were not related to individual differences in perception of the target width in these tasks. We inferred from these data that the work relating golf hole size perception to performance as well as softball hitting to ball size judgments might be related to response bias processes. In the present study, we use a much simpler set of Fitts's Law tasks to replicate the previous work, as well as to extend this work to different manipulations of the perception of target width. Eighty subjects, split into two groups performed two Fitts's Law tasks, a 10 cm and a 20 cm distance to a 1 cm wide target. Half of the subjects then made a judgment of target width to a set of targets that ranged from 8 mm to 12 mm (20% range) or from 9 mm to 11 mm (10% range). We found that in each group, research participants did not show a relation between Fitts's Law performance and judgment of target width. These results extend and replicate the work reported last year that showed no relation between perception and performance. We speculate that individuals need to know how well they performed for this relation to be observed.