Action-specific perception

  Jessica Witt has a 2011 review article dealing with her "action-specific perception account." It presents a line of work that is a very important extension of Gibson, whom she centrally acknowledges.  She and colleagues have shown in a dozen or more publications, usually with several studies each, that action potential affects an actor’s perception of the situation.
  When you are hitting well, the softball is, in fact, judged larger. When you have been field-goal kicking well, the goal posts look nearer – but not before you’ve kicked.  When you have a reaching tool, out of reach objects seem closer.  When you have had a sugar energy drink, hills seem less steep (but less so if the drink was artificially sweetened, even though subjects couldn’t detect the chemical difference !).  A hammer placed conveniently for gripping looks closer than one placed at an equal distance but an angle less convenient to the gripping hand.  
   She reports several studies that rebut the objection that the results could be biases in the process of making and reporting a judgment, rather than the underlying perception itself.
   She tells an evolutionary advantage (aka «just-so») story, in this case, better distance adjustment in hunting.  But this bypasses what seems to me the MUCH LARGER  Gibsonian implication: seeing everything in terms of its action possibilities relative to the momentary state leaves an organism continuously action-ready. That should have very large benefits even if the implicit logic of the readiness «assessments» is fairly crude.  (doi: 10.1177/0963721411408770 )

More on word frequencies of 'habit' and 'routine'

A little more fooling around with google's Ngram tool produced this interesting plot of frequencies of the phrases 'my habit', 'our habit', 'my routine', and 'our routine', from 1800-2000 in their sample of one million English books.

  
   



I chose these search phrases out of interest in whether 'habit' and 'routine' differ historically in their individual or collective connotations. The interesting result is that 'habit' has more often been mine than ours, while routine has more often been ours than mine. I take this as a suggestion that the collective connotation is stronger for 'routine' and the individual one is stronger for 'habit', though each clearly has a substantial frequency in its «minority» connotation.

This link, http://tinyurl.com/habit-routine , will let you reproduce the query, examine specific examples of the usage from different eras, and try other queries.