The aim of the current study was to investigate how performance accuracy on a soccer free-kick task affects perception of the distance between the ball and goal and the perception of kickability. It was hypothesized that action-specific biases in perception of environmental properties (i.e., distance) would be grounded in affordance perception (i.e., kickability). We used a modified staircase procedure in order to investigate the accuracy with which skilled soccer players were able to perceive whether free-kick situations presented over a wide range of distances from goal were kickable or not. Participants were also required to estimate the distances of the free-kicks from goal using a perceptual-matching task. Results showed that distance perception was correlated with kicking performance, but only at the boundary of the participants` perceived kickability. It was also found that perception of kickability was more strongly related to success in the free-kick task than distance perception per se. Results support the notion derived from Proffitt's (2006) account that action-specific effects on the perception of the environment properties are grounded in the perception of affordances.
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