Koul Atesh, Cavallo Andrea, Ansuini Caterina, Becchio Cristina
C'MON Unit, Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Center for Human Technologies, Via E. Melen 83, 16152, Genova, Italy.
Department of Psychology, University of Torino, Via Po 14, 10123, Torino, Italy.
PLoS One. 2016 Oct 25;11(10):e0165297. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0165297. eCollection 2016.
Individuals show significant variations in performing a motor act. Previous studies in the action observation literature have largely ignored this ubiquitous, if often unwanted, characteristic of motor performance, assuming movement patterns to be highly similar across repetitions and individuals. In the present study, we examined the possibility that individual variations in motor style directly influence the ability to understand and predict others' actions. To this end, we first recorded grasping movements performed with different intents and used a two-step cluster analysis to identify quantitatively 'clusters' of movements performed with similar movement styles (Experiment 1). Next, using videos of the same movements, we proceeded to examine the influence of these styles on the ability to judge intention from action observation (Experiments 2 and 3). We found that motor styles directly influenced observers' ability to 'read' others' intention, with some styles always being less 'readable' than others. These results provide experimental support for the significance of motor variability for action prediction, suggesting that the ability to predict what another person is likely to do next directly depends on her individual movement style.
个体在执行一个动作时表现出显著差异。动作观察文献中的先前研究很大程度上忽略了这种运动表现中普遍存在的（即便常常是不受欢迎的）特征，假定运动模式在重复和个体之间高度相似。在本研究中，我们考察了运动风格的个体差异直接影响理解和预测他人动作能力的可能性。为此，我们首先记录了带有不同意图执行的抓握动作，并使用两步聚类分析来定量识别以相似运动风格执行的动作“簇”（实验1）。接下来，我们使用相同动作的视频，着手考察这些风格对从动作观察中判断意图能力的影响（实验2和3）。我们发现运动风格直接影响观察者“解读”他人意图的能力，有些风格总是比其他风格更难“解读”。这些结果为运动变异性对动作预测的重要性提供了实验支持，表明预测他人接下来可能做什么的能力直接取决于其个体运动风格。
