Graf Markus, Reitzner Bianca, Corves Caroline, Casile Antonino, Giese Martin, Prinz Wolfgang
Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Department of Psychology, Amalienstrasse 33, D-80799 Munich, Germany.
Neuroimage. 2007;36 Suppl 2:T22-32. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.03.017. Epub 2007 Mar 27.
There is convincing evidence for a mirror system in humans which simulates actions of conspecifics. One possible purpose of such a simulation system is to support action prediction in real-time. Our goal was to study whether the prediction of actions involves a real-time simulation process. We motion-captured a number of human actions and rendered them as point-light action sequences. Observers perceived brief videos of these actions, followed by an occluder and a static test posture. We independently varied the occluder time and the movement gap (i.e., the time between the endpoint of the action and the test posture). Observers were required to judge whether the test stimulus depicted a continuation of the action in the same depth orientation. Prediction performance was best when occluder time and movement gap corresponded, i.e., when the test posture was a continuation of the sequence that matched the occluder duration (Experiments 1, 2 and 4). This pattern of results was destroyed when the sequences and test images were flipped around the horizontal axis (Experiment 3). Overall, our findings suggest that action prediction involves a simulation process that operates in real-time. This process can break down when the actions are presented under viewing conditions for which observers have little experience.
有令人信服的证据表明，人类存在一个模拟同种个体动作的镜像系统。这种模拟系统的一个可能目的是支持实时动作预测。我们的目标是研究动作预测是否涉及实时模拟过程。我们对一些人类动作进行了动作捕捉，并将其呈现为点光动作序列。观察者观看这些动作的简短视频，随后是一个遮挡物和一个静态测试姿势。我们分别改变了遮挡时间和动作间隔（即动作终点与测试姿势之间的时间）。要求观察者判断测试刺激是否描绘了在相同深度方向上动作的延续。当遮挡时间和动作间隔相匹配时，即当测试姿势是与遮挡持续时间相匹配的序列的延续时，预测性能最佳（实验1、2和4）。当序列和测试图像围绕水平轴翻转时，这种结果模式被破坏（实验3）。总体而言，我们的研究结果表明，动作预测涉及一个实时运行的模拟过程。当动作在观察者几乎没有经验的观看条件下呈现时，这个过程可能会失效。
