I see what you mean

The ability to understand and predict others' behavior is essential for successful interactions. When making predictions about what other humans will do, we treat them as intentional systems and adopt the intentional stance, i.e., refer to their mental states such as desires and intentions. In the present experiments, we investigated whether the mere belief that the observed agent is an intentional system influences basic social attention mechanisms. We presented pictures of a human and a robot face in a gaze cuing paradigm and manipulated the likelihood of adopting the intentional stance by instruction: in some conditions, participants were told that they were observing a human or a robot, in others, that they were observing a human-like mannequin or a robot whose eyes were controlled by a human. In conditions in which participants were made to believe they were observing human behavior (intentional stance likely) gaze cuing effects were significantly larger as compared to conditions when adopting the intentional stance was less likely. This effect was independent of whether a human or a robot face was presented. Therefore, we conclude that adopting the intentional stance when observing others' behavior fundamentally influences basic mechanisms of social attention. The present results provide striking evidence that high-level cognitive processes, such as beliefs, modulate bottom-up mechanisms of attentional selection in a top-down manner

Liegen ähnliche Mechanismen Kategorisierungsprozessen mit und ohne Rückmeldung zugrunde?

Es werden drei Experimente berichtet, die der Frage nachgehen, ob ein als �Blocking� bezeichnetes Phänomen, die Vernachlässigung redundanter Information, auch in Klassifikationsparadigmen ohne Rückmeldung auftritt. Der Blocking-Effekt wird als typisches Merkmal fehlergetriebenen Lernens angesehen und daher gewöhnlich nur mit Kategorisierungsparadigmen mit Rückmeldung in Verbindung gebracht. Während sich die Ergebnisse der ersten Studie mittels zwei post-hoc Annahmen gut mit der Hypothese eines Blocking-Effektes auch in Klassifizierungsparadigmen ohne Rückmeldung vereinbaren lassen, kann die zweite Studie vermutlich eine Grenze dieses Effektes durch deliberate kognitive Prozesse aufzeigen. Die ersten zwei Experimente untersuchen den Blocking-Effekt bei drei Kategorien. Im dritten Experiment erhalten die Teilnehmer eine Entscheidungsmöglichkeit lediglich zwischen zwei Kategorien. Es wird versucht die empirischen Daten mittels Netzwerksimulationen zu deuten. Ein Hauptaugenmerk ruht dabei auf der Annahme eines Rückmeldeprozesses über die bisherige Konsistenz der Zuordnung. Um die empirischen Daten zu erklären, müssen keine spezifischen Annahmen hinsichtlich der genauen Verarbeitungsprozesse der Rückmeldung getroffen werden. Damit lässt sich die hier diskutierte Modellvorstellung gut in allgemeine Kategorisierungsmodelle mit Rückmeldung (z.B. Pearce & Hall, 1980, Pearce, 1994) einbauen. Auch die Modellvorstellungen von Kruschke und Johansen (1999) lassen sich mit den hier beschriebenen Modellvorschlägen vereinbaren. Es wird versucht eine Brücke zwischen Kategorisierungsmodellen mit und ohne Rückmeldung zu schlagen

On interference effects in concurrent perception and action

Recent studies have reported repulsion effects between the perception of visual motion and the concurrent production of hand movements. Two models, based on the notions of common coding and internal forward modeling, have been proposed to account for these phenomena. They predict that the size of the effects in perception and action should be monotonically related and vary with the amount of similarity between what is produced and perceived. These predictions were tested in four experiments in which participants were asked to make hand movements in certain directions while simultaneously encoding the direction of an independent stimulus motion. As expected, perceived directions were repelled by produced directions, and produced directions were repelled by perceived directions. However, contrary to the models, the size of the effects in perception and action did not covary, nor did they depend (as predicted) on the amount of perception–action similarity. We propose that such interactions are mediated by the activation of categorical representations

Acting while perceiving: assimilation precedes contrast

To explore the nature of specific interactions between concurrent perception and action, participants were asked to move one of their hands in a certain direction while simultaneously observing an independent stimulus motion of a (dis)similar direction. The kinematics of the hand trajectories revealed a form of contrast effect (CE) in that the produced directions were biased away from the perceived directions (“Experiment 1”). Specifically, the endpoints of horizontal movements were lower when having watched an upward as opposed to a downward motion. However, when participants moved under higher speed constraints and were not presented with the stimulus motion prior to initiating their movements, the CE was preceded by an assimilation effect, i.e., movements were biased toward the stimulus motion directions (“Experiment 2”). These findings extend those of related studies by showing that CEs of this type actually correspond to the second phase of a bi-phasic pattern of specific perception–action interference

Assimilation and contrast: the two sides of specific interference between action and perception. Psychol. Res. 76, 171–182. Conflict of Interest Statement: The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial r

Abstract Perception and action have long been treated as relatively independent and serial processes. More recent views, however, consider perception and action as relying on a common set of processes and/or representations. The present paper will focus on a variety of specific (contentbased) perception-action interactions that have been taken as support for such views. In particular, the following aspects will be considered: direction of influence (perception on action vs. action on perception), temporal type (concurrent vs. non-concurrent), functional relation (related/unrelated), and type of movements (biological vs. non-biological). Different extant models of the perceptionaction interface are discussed and a classification schema proposed that tries to explain when contrast and when assimilation effects will arise