Reply to Hutchison and Loomis

Resumen

Proffitt, Stefanucci, Banton, and Epstein (2003) reported a set of studies showing that the perceived distance to a target is influenced by the effort required to walk to its location. Hutchison and Loomis (H&L) reported an experiment that failed to find a significant influence of effort on indices of apparent distance. There were numerous important differences between the design and methods of H&L’s study and those of Proffitt et al. Moreover, there are important theoretical reasons to believe that these differences were responsible for the different results. The theoretical motivation of H&L’s studies was also brought into question.