Potters Make Shorter Pots Under Conditions of Reduced Sensory Input

Abstract

Although people have made clay pots for millennia, little behavioral research has explored how they do so. We were specifically interested in potters’ use of auditory, haptic, and visual feedback. We asked what would happen if one or two of these sources of feedback were removed and potters tried to create pots of a given height, stopping when they thought they had reached that height. We asked students in a pottery class to build simple clay vessels either when they had full sensory feedback (in the control condition for all participants) or when they had reduced input from one modality (in Experiment 1) or two modalities (in Experiment 2). Participants were asked to stop building the vessels when they thought the vessels were 5 in. high. We found that participants produced shorter vessels when one or more forms of sensory feedback was reduced. The degree of shortening did not depend on the type or number of reduced sensory channels. The results are consistent with a control hypothesis where potters must have learned how to use sensory feedback from the modalities to help them control their ceramic creations. The results help highlight the importance of the intimate connections between perception and action.