Radboud University Nijmegen, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Cardiff University, School of Psychology, Cardiff, United Kingdom.
Sci Rep. 2017 Apr 25;7:46761. doi: 10.1038/srep46761.
Prior knowledge affects how we perceive the world and the sensorimotor system actively guides our perception. An ongoing dispute regards the extent to which prior motor knowledge versus conceptual knowledge modulates the observation of others' actions. Research indicates that motor experience increases motor activation during action perception. Other research, however, has shown that conceptual familiarity with actions also modulates motor activation, i.e., increased motor activation during observation of unfamiliar, compared to conceptually familiar, actions. To begin to disentangle motor from conceptual contributions to action perception, we uniquely combined motoric and conceptual interventions into one design. We experimentally manipulated participants' experience with both motoric skills and conceptual knowledge, via motor training of kinematically challenging actions and contextual information about the action, respectively, in a week-long training session. Measurements of the effects on motor activity measured via electroencephalography (EEG) during pre- and post-training action observation were compared. We found distinct, non-interacting effects of both manipulations: Motor training increased motor activation, whereas additional conceptual knowledge decreased motor activation. The findings indicate that both factors influence action perception in a distinct and parallel manner. This research speaks to previously irreconcilable findings and provides novel insights about the distinct roles of motor and conceptual contributions to action perception.
先前的知识会影响我们对世界的感知，而感觉运动系统会主动引导我们的感知。一个持续存在的争议是，先前的运动知识与概念知识在多大程度上调节了对他人行为的观察。研究表明，运动经验会增加动作感知过程中的运动激活。然而，其他研究表明，对动作的概念熟悉程度也会调节运动激活，即在观察不熟悉的动作时，会比概念上熟悉的动作产生更高的运动激活。为了开始将运动和概念贡献分开来解释动作感知，我们在一个设计中独特地结合了运动和概念干预。我们通过为期一周的训练，分别通过运动训练具有运动挑战性的动作和关于动作的上下文信息来实验性地操纵参与者的运动技能和概念知识经验。在训练前后观察动作时，通过脑电图 (EEG) 测量的运动活动的影响进行了比较。我们发现这两种干预的效果具有明显的、非相互作用的影响：运动训练增加了运动激活，而额外的概念知识则降低了运动激活。研究结果表明，这两个因素以独特且平行的方式影响动作感知。这项研究解决了以前无法调和的发现，并为运动和概念贡献对动作感知的不同作用提供了新的见解。
