Faculty of Life Sciences, Moffat Building, The University of Manchester, PO Box 88, Sackville Street, Manchester M60 1QD, United Kingdom.
Brain Cogn. 2010 Dec;74(3):288-97. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2010.08.010. Epub 2010 Sep 16.
Observation of human actions influences the observer's own motor system, termed visuomotor priming, and is believed to be caused by automatic activation of mirror neurons. Evidence suggests that priming effects are larger for biological (human) as opposed to non-biological (object) stimuli and enhanced when viewing stimuli in mirror compared to anatomical orientation. However, there is conflicting evidence concerning the extent of differences between biological and non-biological stimuli, which may be due to stimulus related confounds. Over three experiments, we compared how visuomotor priming for biological and non-biological stimuli was affected over views, over time and when attention to the moving stimulus was manipulated. The results indicated that the strength of priming for the two stimulus types was dependent on attentional location and load. This highlights that visuomotor priming is not an automatic process and provides a possible explanation for conflicting evidence regarding the differential effects of biological and non-biological stimuli.
对人类行为的观察会影响观察者自身的运动系统，这种现象被称为运动视知觉启动效应，被认为是由镜像神经元的自动激活引起的。有证据表明，与非生物（物体）刺激相比，生物（人类）刺激的启动效应更大，并且当以镜像而不是解剖学方向观看刺激时，启动效应会增强。然而，关于生物和非生物刺激之间差异的程度存在相互矛盾的证据，这可能是由于刺激相关的混淆。在三个实验中，我们比较了在不同视角、不同时间以及在注意力被转移到运动刺激时，运动视知觉对生物和非生物刺激的启动效应是如何受到影响的。结果表明，两种刺激类型的启动效应强度取决于注意力的位置和负荷。这表明运动视知觉启动效应不是一个自动过程，并为关于生物和非生物刺激的不同影响的相互矛盾的证据提供了一个可能的解释。
