Investigating the rapid extraction of action-relevant information using psychophysical methods

Stanford, Kimberley 2026. Investigating the rapid extraction of action-relevant information using psychophysical methods. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This thesis investigates how rapidly humans can extract information needed to judge whether an action is possible. An initial study establishes the methodology and techniques used throughout this work and demonstrates that judgements of graspability are not fundamentally different across reachable and unreachable space. Two further studies assess the speed with which action information can be extracted. Across a series of grasping and stepping judgement tasks, participants made action judgements after viewing stimuli for either 30ms, 150ms or 2000ms. Precision of these judgements was used as a psychophysical indicator of how well participants could extract information that was relevant to their judgements. Across a range of tasks, precision of judgements after 30ms was comparable to precision after longer viewing durations. In more complex scenes, precision declined at 30ms, although meaningful judgements were still possible, and performance recovered substantially by 150ms, with little benefit to further viewing. This demonstrates that visual action-specific information can be extracted from the environment very rapidly to inform action judgements.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > Psychology
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	8 September 2026
Last Modified:	08 Sep 2026 10:25
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/189463

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