School of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin Dublin, Ireland ; Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin Dublin, Ireland.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2013 Nov 25;7:795. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00795. eCollection 2013.
When interpreting other people's movements or actions, observers may not only rely on the visual cues available in the observed movement, but they may also be able to "put themselves in the other person's shoes" by engaging brain systems involved in both "mentalizing" and motor simulation. The ageing process brings changes in both perceptual and motor abilities, yet little is known about how these changes may affect the ability to accurately interpret other people's actions. Here we investigated the effect of ageing on the ability to discriminate the weight of objects based on the movements of actors lifting these objects. Stimuli consisted of videos of an actor lifting a small box weighing 0.05-0.9 kg or a large box weighting 3-18 kg. In a four-alternative forced-choice task, younger and older participants reported the perceived weight of the box in each video. Overall, older participants were less sensitive than younger participants in discriminating the perceived weight of lifted boxes, an effect that was especially pronounced in the small box condition. Weight discrimination performance was better for the large box compared to the small box in both groups, due to greater saliency of the visual cues in this condition. These results suggest that older adults may require more salient visual cues to interpret the actions of others accurately. We discuss the potential contribution of age-related changes in visual and motor function on the observed effects and suggest that older adults' decline in the sensitivity to subtle visual cues may lead to greater reliance on visual analysis of the observed scene and its semantic context.
当解释他人的动作或行为时，观察者不仅可以依赖于观察到的运动中提供的视觉线索，还可以通过参与涉及“心理化”和运动模拟的大脑系统来“设身处地”。随着年龄的增长，感知和运动能力都会发生变化，但对于这些变化如何影响准确解释他人行为的能力，我们知之甚少。在这里，我们研究了年龄对基于演员提起这些物体的运动来区分物体重量的能力的影响。刺激物包括演员提起重量为 0.05-0.9 千克的小盒子或 3-18 千克的大盒子的视频。在四项选择强制选择任务中，年轻和年长的参与者报告了每个视频中盒子的感知重量。总的来说，与年轻参与者相比，年长参与者在区分提起的盒子的感知重量方面的敏感性较低，这种效果在小盒子条件下尤为明显。由于在这种情况下视觉线索更加明显，与小盒子相比，大盒子的重量辨别性能在两组中都更好。这些结果表明，老年人可能需要更明显的视觉线索才能准确解释他人的动作。我们讨论了视觉和运动功能与观察到的效果相关的年龄相关变化的潜在贡献，并认为老年人对细微视觉线索的敏感性下降可能导致他们更加依赖于对观察到的场景及其语义上下文的视觉分析。
