Decroix Jérémy, Kalénine Solène
UMR 9193-SCALab-Sciences Cognitives et Sciences Affectives, University of Lille, CNRS, CHU Lille, F-59000, Lille, France.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2019 Oct;81(7):2400-2409. doi: 10.3758/s13414-019-01784-7.
The recognition of others' object-directed actions is known to involve the decoding of both the visual kinematics of the action and the action goal. Yet whether action recognition is first guided by the processing of visual kinematics or by a prediction about the goal of the actor remains debated. In order to provide experimental evidence to this issue, the present study aimed at investigating whether visual attention would be preferentially captured by visual kinematics or by action goal information when processing others' actions. In a visual search task, participants were asked to find correct actions (e.g., drinking from glass) among distractor actions. Distractors actions contained grip and/or goal violations and could therefore share the correct goal and/or the correct grip with the target. The time course of fixation proportion on each distractor action has been taken as an indicator of visual attention allocation. Results show that visual attention is first captured by the distractor action with similar goal. Then the withdrawal of visual attention from the action distractor with similar goal suggests a later attentional capture by the action distractor with similar grip. Overall, results are in line with predictive approaches of action understanding, which assume that observers first make a prediction about the actor's goal before verifying this prediction using the visual kinematics of the action.
众所周知，对他人目标导向动作的识别涉及对动作的视觉运动学和动作目标的解码。然而，动作识别最初是由视觉运动学的处理引导，还是由对行为者目标的预测引导，仍存在争议。为了为这个问题提供实验证据，本研究旨在调查在处理他人动作时，视觉注意力是会优先被视觉运动学还是动作目标信息所吸引。在一项视觉搜索任务中，参与者被要求在干扰动作中找到正确的动作（例如，从杯子里喝水）。干扰动作包含抓握和/或目标违背，因此可能与目标动作共享正确的目标和/或正确的抓握方式。每个干扰动作上的注视比例随时间的变化过程被用作视觉注意力分配的指标。结果表明，视觉注意力首先被具有相似目标的干扰动作所吸引。随后，视觉注意力从具有相似目标的动作干扰物上撤离，这表明随后会被具有相似抓握方式的动作干扰物吸引。总体而言，结果与动作理解的预测方法一致，该方法假设观察者首先对行为者的目标进行预测，然后使用动作的视觉运动学来验证这一预测。
