How do people perceive and generate options?

This chapter examines the question of how people perceive and generate options. Although most current theoretical approaches explain option perception and option generation as requiring extensive and costly cognitive processes, we will argue that people perceive their possibilities for action and generate options without such elaborate means. Borrowing from the contributions of direct perception and bounded rationality, we present and analyze data from three sports tasks: the basketball jump shot, ball allocation in handball, and trampoline somersaulting. Data from kinematics, eye-tracking, and choice behavior experiments are presented and reanalyzed to draw the parallels and distinctions between the two approaches. In conclusion, integrating research on perception, action, and cognition provides a promising description of the bidirectional link between mind and motion.