Abstract
Recent evidence indicates that humans can precisely predict the outcome of occluded actions. It has been suggested that these predictions arise from a mental simulation which might run in real-time. The present experiments aimed to specify the time course of this simulation process. Participants watched transiently occluded point-light actions and the temporal outcome after occlusion was manipulated. Participants were instructed to judge the temporal coherence of the action after a short (Experiment 1) and a long occlusion period (Experiment 2). Both experiments revealed a comparable negative point of subjective equality (PSE), indicating that action simulation took constantly longer than the observed action itself. Such a temporal error was not present when inverted actions were used, (Experiment 3) ruling out a pure visually driven effect. The results suggest that the temporal error is due to costs arising from a switch from action perception to an internal simulation process involving motor representations.
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Notes
We decided on a foot response because follow-up studies are planned in which the presented paradigm is combined with secondary motor tasks involving both hands. Earlier studies in our laboratory gave no indication that foot responses differed from hand responses in either error rates or RTs.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Wiebke Berger for assistance in data acquisition and Mathias Lesche for support in programming. We are grateful to Bernhard Hommel and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.
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Sparenberg, P., Springer, A. & Prinz, W. Predicting others’ actions: evidence for a constant time delay in action simulation. Psychological Research 76, 41–49 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-011-0321-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-011-0321-z