School of Psychology, Bangor University, Bangor, UK.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2011 Feb;18(1):171-6. doi: 10.3758/s13423-010-0029-x.
An important question for the study of social interactions is how the motor actions of others are represented. Research has demonstrated that simply watching someone perform an action activates a similar motor representation in oneself. Key issues include (1) the automaticity of such processes, and (2) the role object affordances play in establishing motor representations of others' actions. Participants were asked to move a lever to the left or right to respond to the grip width of a hand moving across a workspace. Stimulus-response compatibility effects were modulated by two task-irrelevant aspects of the visual stimulus: the observed reach direction and the match between hand-grasp and the affordance evoked by an incidentally presented visual object. These findings demonstrate that the observation of another person's actions automatically evokes sophisticated motor representations that reflect the relationship between actions and objects even when an action is not directed towards an object.
对于社会互动研究来说，一个重要的问题是他人的动作是如何被表现出来的。研究表明，仅仅观察别人做一个动作就会在自己身上激活类似的运动表现。关键问题包括（1）这些过程的自动性，以及（2）对象提供的作用在建立他人动作的运动表现中的作用。参与者被要求向左或向右移动操纵杆，以响应在工作空间中移动的手的握持宽度。刺激-反应兼容性的影响受到视觉刺激两个与任务无关的方面的调节：观察到的到达方向和手抓握与偶然呈现的视觉对象引起的可供性之间的匹配。这些发现表明，即使一个动作不是针对一个物体，观察另一个人的动作也会自动引起复杂的运动表现，反映动作和物体之间的关系。
