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Adults Do Not Distinguish Action Intentions Based on Movement Kinematics Presented in Naturalistic Settings

Predicting others’ actions is an essential part of acting in the social world. Action kinematics have been proposed to be a cue about others’ intentions. It is still an open question as to whether adults can use kinematic information in naturalistic settings when presented as a part of a richer visu...

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Autores principales: Rutkowska, Joanna M., Meyer, Marlene, Hunnius, Sabine
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8234011/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34205675
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11060821
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author Rutkowska, Joanna M.
Meyer, Marlene
Hunnius, Sabine
author_facet Rutkowska, Joanna M.
Meyer, Marlene
Hunnius, Sabine
author_sort Rutkowska, Joanna M.
collection PubMed
description Predicting others’ actions is an essential part of acting in the social world. Action kinematics have been proposed to be a cue about others’ intentions. It is still an open question as to whether adults can use kinematic information in naturalistic settings when presented as a part of a richer visual scene than previously examined. We investigated adults’ intention perceptions from kinematics using naturalistic stimuli in two experiments. In experiment 1, thirty participants watched grasp-to-drink and grasp-to-place movements and identified the movement intention (to drink or to place), whilst their mouth-opening muscle activity was measured with electromyography (EMG) to examine participants’ motor simulation of the observed actions. We found anecdotal evidence that participants could correctly identify the intentions from the action kinematics, although we found no evidence for increased activation of their mylohyoid muscle during the observation of grasp-to-drink compared to grasp-to-place actions. In pre-registered experiment 2, fifty participants completed the same task online. With the increased statistical power, we found strong evidence that participants were not able to discriminate intentions based on movement kinematics. Together, our findings suggest that the role of action kinematics in intention perception is more complex than previously assumed. Although previous research indicates that under certain circumstances observers can perceive and act upon intention-specific kinematic information, perceptual differences in everyday scenes or the observers’ ability to use kinematic information in more naturalistic scenes seems limited.
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spelling pubmed-82340112021-06-27 Adults Do Not Distinguish Action Intentions Based on Movement Kinematics Presented in Naturalistic Settings Rutkowska, Joanna M. Meyer, Marlene Hunnius, Sabine Brain Sci Article Predicting others’ actions is an essential part of acting in the social world. Action kinematics have been proposed to be a cue about others’ intentions. It is still an open question as to whether adults can use kinematic information in naturalistic settings when presented as a part of a richer visual scene than previously examined. We investigated adults’ intention perceptions from kinematics using naturalistic stimuli in two experiments. In experiment 1, thirty participants watched grasp-to-drink and grasp-to-place movements and identified the movement intention (to drink or to place), whilst their mouth-opening muscle activity was measured with electromyography (EMG) to examine participants’ motor simulation of the observed actions. We found anecdotal evidence that participants could correctly identify the intentions from the action kinematics, although we found no evidence for increased activation of their mylohyoid muscle during the observation of grasp-to-drink compared to grasp-to-place actions. In pre-registered experiment 2, fifty participants completed the same task online. With the increased statistical power, we found strong evidence that participants were not able to discriminate intentions based on movement kinematics. Together, our findings suggest that the role of action kinematics in intention perception is more complex than previously assumed. Although previous research indicates that under certain circumstances observers can perceive and act upon intention-specific kinematic information, perceptual differences in everyday scenes or the observers’ ability to use kinematic information in more naturalistic scenes seems limited. MDPI 2021-06-21 /pmc/articles/PMC8234011/ /pubmed/34205675 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11060821 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Rutkowska, Joanna M.
Meyer, Marlene
Hunnius, Sabine
Adults Do Not Distinguish Action Intentions Based on Movement Kinematics Presented in Naturalistic Settings
title Adults Do Not Distinguish Action Intentions Based on Movement Kinematics Presented in Naturalistic Settings
title_full Adults Do Not Distinguish Action Intentions Based on Movement Kinematics Presented in Naturalistic Settings
title_fullStr Adults Do Not Distinguish Action Intentions Based on Movement Kinematics Presented in Naturalistic Settings
title_full_unstemmed Adults Do Not Distinguish Action Intentions Based on Movement Kinematics Presented in Naturalistic Settings
title_short Adults Do Not Distinguish Action Intentions Based on Movement Kinematics Presented in Naturalistic Settings
title_sort adults do not distinguish action intentions based on movement kinematics presented in naturalistic settings
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8234011/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34205675
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11060821
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