Factors that affect action possibility judgments: The assumed abilities of other people

• We investigated how people determine if it is possible for someone else to do a task.
• Participants judged if different people could accurately move at different speeds.
• Judgments of what was possible were adapted to the capabilities of the actor.
• Judgments were formed with ego-centered simulations and then voluntarily adjusted.

Judging what actions are possible and impossible to complete is a skill that is critical for planning and executing movements in both individual and joint actions contexts. The present experiments explored the ability to adapt action possibility judgments to the assumed characteristics of another person. Participants watched alternating pictures of a person's hand moving at different speeds between targets of different indexes of difficulty (according to Fitts' Law) and judged whether or not it was possible for individuals with different characteristics to maintain movement accuracy at the presented speed. Across four studies, the person in the pictures and the background information about the person were manipulated to determine how and under what conditions participants adapted their judgments. Results revealed that participants adjusted their possibility judgments to the assumed motor capabilities of the individual they were judging. However, these adjustments only occurred when participants were instructed to take the other person into consideration suggesting that the adaption process is a voluntary process. Further, it was observed that the slopes of the regression equations relating movement time and index of difficulty did not differ across conditions. All differences between conditions were in the y-intercept of the regression lines. This pattern of findings suggests that participants formed the action possibility judgments by first simulating their own performance, and then adjusted the “possibility” threshold by adding or subtracting a correction factor to determine what is and is not possible for the other person to perform.