Pregnant women are not confused about the spaces around them

Main Point:

Scientists have found that pregnant women can equally judge the space around them as other people such passing through the doorways.

Published in:

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics

Study Further:

In the present study, researchers worked with 11 women during their course of pregnancies and found that the changing body shapes don’t affect the spatial judgments. This good judgment is attributed to a process called as perceptual-motor recalibration that helps people to adjust themselves according to the changing body shapes and sizes.

The possibilities to perform certain actions are shown by the balance between the body and environment, and are known as “affordances”. Affordances usually occur in the person’s life and change, when the body changes relative to the environment.

“Pregnant women accurately perceived the space needed to accommodate their growing bodies,” wrote Franchak, who stated that changes to the body must be considered with respect to a task and an environment, and what is possible to perform or not.

“The experience of weight gain or weight loss likely operates similarly to pregnancy— experience might be necessary to facilitate recalibration to changes in body size and compression, in other words, how much the body can be 'squeezed' to fit through a specific opening,” added Adolph.

“These findings indicate that experience facilitates perceptual–motor recalibration for certain types of actions,” Researchers wrote.

Related Article on SayPeople.com - Minimum time of Pregnancy (http://goo.gl/ESekJW)

Sources:

Life’s not a squeeze for pregnant women - AlphaGalileo (http://goo.gl/6DKWSH)

Gut estimates: Pregnant women adapt to changing possibilities for squeezing through doorways - Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics (http://goo.gl/43Ti06)