Further comments on the possible adverse effects of taking too
long during target shooting.
I suggested in my recent mailing that if errors were indeed found to
increase if you spent too long looking through the rifle sights
during target shooting, this might result from errors arising in the
various frame-of-reference conversions required. In response to
Larry Snyder's comment let me be a little more explicit in how I
expect those errors to have their effect.
Let us take an example in which the errors, howsoever they arise,
cause the target to be misperceived IN SPACE to the left. That would
mean that there was a tendency to move the barrel of the gun to the
left. Of course, any ACTUAL movements in that direction would result
in the cross-hairs becoming misaligned with the target and the
visual feedback loop would pull the gun back into the aligned
position. But there would be a TENDENCY to move in that direction.
And if the feedback loop were ever broken, by a blink, for example,
or if the resulting visual movements were too small or too slow to activate the
visual feedback correction adequately, then the gun would start to
drift in that direction.
This becomes an empirical question. I predict that errors would
tend to be in one direction and that they increase with the
time spent looking through the sights. Errors that arise from purely
visual sources should be more symmetrical about the target. Actually,
as far as I know, we do not even know if the original premise (that
errors increase if you look through the sights too long) is actually
correct.
Laurence Harris
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Laurence Harris phone: (416) 736-2100 x 66108
Department of Psychology fax: (416) 736-5814
York University
Toronto,Ontario M3J 1P3
CANADA
YORKVIS web page: http://www.yorku.ca/dept/psych/yorkvis/
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