This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky. Got a minute?

Take this quote from Mickey Mantle.

After hitting this monstrous home run, he said he couldn't really explain it.

He just saw the ball as big as a grapefruit.

Jessica Witt of Colorado State University, February 13th at the annual meeting of the American

Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.

To see if athletes performing better really do perceive their environment differently, she went to softball games and when the games were

over I lured the players over to my booth with promises of Gatorade and I showed them

this poster board.

And I said, which of these circles is the same size as a softball.

And this is how we measure perception.

It's hard to measure perception because perception's an internal state.

Well, one way we can measure it is to use two experiments like this, where we say,

which one of these matches what you see?

And what I found was that which one of these matches what you see.

And what I found was that people who hit better

selected a larger circle,

meaning the batters who are hitting better

saw the ball as bigger, which means not everyone sees the ball

the same way and it also means that what we see is affected by our ability to act. Performance impacts vision.

In other studies she found that golfers who putted better saw the hole as bigger than did poor putters.

Faster swimmers saw targets under water. as try to make field goals. The ones who did better saw the space between the

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