School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, 6140, New Zealand.
School of Sport, Health and Wellbeing, Plymouth Marjon University, Plymouth, PL6 8BH, UK.
Sci Rep. 2020 Jul 9;10(1):11311. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-68240-7.
Our motor system can generate representations which carry information about the goals of another agent's actions. However, it is not known whether motor representations play a deeper role in social understanding, and, in particular, whether they enable tracking others' beliefs. Here we show that, for adult observers, reliably manifesting an ability to track another's false belief critically depends on representing the agent's potential actions motorically. One signature of motor representations is that they can be disrupted by constraints on an observed agent's action capacities. We therefore used a 'mummification' technique to manipulate whether the agent in a visual ball-detection task was free to act or whether he was visibly constrained from acting. Adults' reaction times reliably reflected the agent's beliefs only when the agent was free to act on the ball and not when the agent was visibly constrained from acting. Furthermore, it was the agent's constrained action capabilities, rather than any perceptual novelty, that determined whether adult observers' reaction times reliably reflected the agent's beliefs. These findings signal that our motor system may underpin more of social cognition than previously imagined, and, in particular, that motor representations may underpin automatic false-belief tracking.
我们的运动系统可以产生携带关于另一个主体的动作目标信息的表示。然而，目前尚不清楚运动表示是否在社会理解中扮演更深入的角色，特别是它们是否能够追踪他人的信念。在这里，我们表明，对于成年观察者来说，可靠地表现出跟踪他人错误信念的能力，关键取决于运动地代表主体的潜在动作。运动表示的一个特征是，它们可以被观察到的主体的动作能力的限制所破坏。因此，我们使用“木乃伊化”技术来操纵在视觉球检测任务中的主体是否可以自由行动，或者他是否明显受到行动的限制。只有当主体可以自由地对球进行操作而不是主体明显受到限制时，成年人的反应时间才会可靠地反映主体的信念。此外，是主体的受限动作能力而不是任何感知新奇性决定了成年观察者的反应时间是否可靠地反映了主体的信念。这些发现表明，我们的运动系统可能支持比以前想象的更多的社会认知，特别是运动表示可能支持自动错误信念跟踪。
