In many ways, we have a way of adapting our internal frame of reference. Instead of conforming to some objective reality, we often will try to place ourselves into the reference and determine how something might seem to us.
Considering my own personal experience, I think that this is true. When we've gone on walks, I might consider two miles to be a relative stroll while my son (who strides at half my pace) may consider it an endless march!
This article from Science of Us discusses how baseball players differ in the ways that they personally perceive a pitch. To a good hitter, the ball can seem much larger than to someone who struggles to put the ball in play. The ball itself doesn't change--it's only our perception of it that does!
For a 2005 paper, research psychologists Jessica Witt and Dennis Proffitt set up a table beside a softball game in Charlottesville, Virginia, the home of their school, the University of Virginia. For a free sports drink, ballplayers — 47 in all — were asked to partake in a brief psychology experiment. They were shown a poster with eight black circles on it, ranging from 9 centimeters to 11.8 centimeters in diameter. They were then asked to pick which circle corresponded the best with the actual size of a softball, which measures 10 centimeters. After selecting their circle, they reported their stats: at bats, hits, walks, and the like. The result: The better they hit, the bigger circle they selected. “If you’re hitting well the ball looks bigger, and if the ball looks bigger, you’re going to hit better,” Proffitt tells Science of Us. “What that suggests is that there is a reciprocal relationship between the perceived size and how well you’re going to do, and how well you do is going to be reflected in how big you perceive the object.”
I learned a new concept: affordance.
While we walk around with the common-sense assumption that everybody sees the same objective reality, Proffitt says that nobody sees the same reality. The geometry your brain takes in isn’t the “disembodied” geometry of yardsticks, meters, and inches, which mean a lot in the abstractions of engineering or physics or math, but the “embodied” geometry of your physical form: The most accurate measurement, to an individual, is the most personal. That a basketball hoop is ten feet high means something very different to you if you’re five feet or seven feet tall. While hoops and goals and roads have objective qualities, what we see and perceive is profoundly shaped by the subjective — by your ability to interact with them. The research backs this up: Golfers who are putting well see holes as bigger; football placekickers who score more field goals see the uprights as wider and the crossbar lower; successful dart throwers recall targets being larger.
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In psychology, this dynamic between an object and the things you can do with an object is called an “affordance,” coined by Cornell University psychologist and James J. Gibson, who is something of a Martin Luther–type figure in the study of visual perception. To Gibson, an affordance is the way an object and a subject fit together. “We call it a seat in general, or a stool, bench, chair, and so on, in particular,” Gibson wrote in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. It can be natural like a ledge or rock or artificial, like a couch or a bleacher. “The color and texture of the surface are irrelevant,” he continues. “Knee-high for a child is not the same as knee-high for an adult, so the affordance is relative to the size of the individual. But if a surface is horizontal, flat, extended, rigid, and knee-high relative to a perceiver, it can in fact be sat upon.” Regardless of what the object is, if it fits a sittable set of qualities, then you can take a seat. It affords that to you.
The article goes on to talk about how the best players are actually using pattern recognition to determine which pitches are the best to swing at.
I like the idea that the world conforms to our personal experience of it. I think that must be true because I find it difficult to imagine that we could all perceive things in exactly the same manner.
Here is a link to the full article: The Science of How Baseball Players Hit Fastballs
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