Centre for Brain Science, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3 SQ, UK.
Psychol Res. 2012 Nov;76(6):736-46. doi: 10.1007/s00426-011-0395-7. Epub 2011 Dec 6.
Social inhibition of return is the phenomenon whereby an individual is slower to reach to locations to which another individual has recently responded. Although this suggests that an observer represents another person's action, little is known about which aspects of the action are encoded. The present work describes a series of three experiments examining whether social inhibition of return represents the endpoint goal of the action, i.e., is 'goal based'. Pairs of participants sat opposite to one another and alternated responses to a cued or non-cued object presented on a table top. Importantly, either the two participants performed the same interaction with the object or a different interaction. Although all our experiments showed social inhibition of return, the size of the effect was not modulated according to whether each participant had the same or different goal. We conclude that although the mechanisms giving rise to social inhibition of return do encode some aspects of a response they do not code for terminal action goals.
社会返回抑制是指个体对另一个人最近做出反应的位置的反应速度较慢的现象。尽管这表明观察者代表了另一个人的行为，但对于行为的哪些方面被编码知之甚少。本研究通过三个实验，检验了社会返回抑制是否代表了行为的终点目标，即“基于目标”。参与者两两相对而坐，交替对桌面呈现的提示或非提示物体做出反应。重要的是，两个参与者要么与物体进行相同的互动，要么进行不同的互动。尽管我们的所有实验都显示出了社会返回抑制，但效应的大小并没有根据每个参与者的目标是否相同或不同而发生变化。我们得出结论，尽管产生社会返回抑制的机制确实编码了反应的某些方面，但它们不编码终端动作目标。
