School of Psychology, Bangor University, Wales, UK.
Brain Cogn. 2011 Jun;76(1):87-96. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2011.02.014. Epub 2011 Apr 8.
Observation of another person executing an action primes the same action in the observer's motor system. Recent evidence has shown that these priming effects are flexible, where training of new associations, such as making a foot response when viewing a moving hand, can reduce standard action priming effects (Gillmeister, Catmur, Liepelt, Brass, & Heyes, 2008). Previously, these effects were obtained after explicit learning tasks in which the trained action was cued by the content of a visual stimulus. Here we report similar learning processes in an implicit task in which the participant's action is self-selected, and subsequent visual effects are determined by the nature of that action. Importantly, we show that these learning processes are specific to associations between actions and viewed body parts, in that incompatible spatial training did not influence body part or spatial priming effects. Our results are consistent with models of visuomotor learning that place particular emphasis on the repeated experience of watching oneself perform an action.
观察他人执行动作会激活观察者运动系统中的相同动作。最近的证据表明，这些启动效应具有灵活性，例如，当观看移动的手时进行脚部反应的训练，可以减少标准动作的启动效应（Gillmeister、Catmur、Liepelt、Brass 和 Heyes，2008）。在此之前，这些效应是在明确的学习任务中获得的，在这些任务中，训练动作是由视觉刺激的内容提示的。在这里，我们报告了一种类似的学习过程，即参与者的动作是自我选择的，随后的视觉效果取决于该动作的性质。重要的是，我们表明这些学习过程是特定于动作和观察到的身体部位之间的关联，因为不兼容的空间训练不会影响身体部位或空间启动效应。我们的结果与视动学习模型一致，这些模型特别强调重复观看自己执行动作的经验。
