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

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 821
Author(s):  
Joanna M. Rutkowska ◽  
Marlene Meyer ◽  
Sabine Hunnius

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.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andres Montealegre ◽  
William Jimenez-Leal

According to the social heuristics hypothesis, people intuitively cooperate or defect depending on which behavior is beneficial in their interactions. If cooperation is beneficial, people intuitively cooperate, but if defection is beneficial, they intuitively defect. However, deliberation promotes defection. Here, we tested two novel predictions regarding the role of trust in the social heuristics hypothesis. First, whether trust promotes intuitive cooperation. Second, whether preferring to think intuitively or deliberatively moderates the effect of trust on cooperation. In addition, we examined whether deciding intuitively promotes cooperation, compared to deciding deliberatively. To evaluate these predictions, we conducted a lab study in Colombia and an online study in the United Kingdom (N = 1,066; one study was pre-registered). Unexpectedly, higher trust failed to promote intuitive cooperation, though higher trust promoted cooperation. In addition, preferring to think intuitively or deliberatively failed to moderate the effect of trust on cooperation, although preferring to think intuitively increased cooperation. Moreover, deciding intuitively failed to promote cooperation, and equivalence testing confirmed that this null result was explained by the absence of an effect, rather than a lack of statistical power (equivalence bounds: d = -0.26 and 0.26). An intuitive cooperation effect emerged when non-compliant participants were excluded, but this effect could be due to selection biases. Taken together, most results failed to support the social heuristics hypothesis. We conclude by discussing implications, future directions, and limitations. The materials, data, and code are available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/939jv/).


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (s1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Hilton ◽  
Sunwoo Jeong

AbstractPrevious research demonstrates that listeners make social inferences about people based on how they speak, and that these inferences vary depending on the linguistic and social context. An open question is exactly how contextual enrichment (i.e. information about the speaker and speaking situation) comes to influence sociolinguistic perception. This paper addresses this question by analyzing data from 10 perception experiments investigating three different linguistic phenomena: number agreement in existential there constructions, intonation contours in declarative sentences, and overlapping speech in conversation. We observe an overall trend that increasing contextual enrichment obscures the effects of linguistic forms. In contextually impoverished stimuli, number nonagreement and rising declaratives trigger perceptions that speakers are less educated and more polite, respectively, but show no effect on listener perceptions when embedded in more contextually rich stimuli. By contrast, overlapping speech shows robust effects on perceived interruptiveness, even in contextually rich stimuli. Drawing on theories from social psychology and linguistic anthropology, we argue that if listeners are able to form sufficient impressions of speakers before encountering the target linguistic feature, they will not modify their impressions to incorporate the social meanings conveyed by the target linguistic feature, unless these social meanings are highly enregistered.


2010 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 195-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonardo Trasande ◽  
Chris Cronk ◽  
Maureen Durkin ◽  
Marianne Weiss ◽  
Dale Schoeller ◽  
...  

We describe the approach taken by the National Children's Study (NCS) to understanding the role of environmental factors in the development of obesity. We review the literature with regard to the two core hypotheses in the NCS that relate to environmental origins of obesity and describe strategies that will be used to test each hypothesis. Although it is clear that obesity in an individual results from an imbalance between energy intake and expenditure, control of the obesity epidemic will require understanding of factors in the modern built environment and chemical exposures that may have the capacity to disrupt the link between energy intake and expenditure. Through its embrace of the life-course approach to epidemiology, the NCS will be able to study the origins of obesity from preconception through late adolescence, including factors ranging from genetic inheritance to individual behaviors to the social, built, and natural environment and chemical exposures. It will have sufficient statistical power to examine interactions among these multiple influences, including geneenvironment and geneobesity interactions. A major secondary benefit will derive from the banking of specimens for future analysis.


2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 233-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Bonetto ◽  
Fabien Girandola ◽  
Grégory Lo Monaco

Abstract. This contribution consists of a critical review of the literature about the articulation of two traditionally separated theoretical fields: social representations and commitment. Besides consulting various works and communications, a bibliographic search was carried out (between February and December, 2016) on various databases using the keywords “commitment” and “social representation,” in the singular and in the plural, in French and in English. Articles published in English or in French, that explicitly made reference to both terms, were included. The relations between commitment and social representations are approached according to two approaches or complementary lines. The first line follows the role of commitment in the representational dynamics: how can commitment transform the representations? This articulation gathers most of the work on the topic. The second line envisages the social representations as determinants of commitment procedures: how can these representations influence the effects of commitment procedures? This literature review will identify unexploited tracks, as well as research perspectives for both areas of research.


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