Department of Psychology, Harvard University, USA.
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, USA.
Neuropsychologia. 2021 Dec 10;163:108048. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2021.108048. Epub 2021 Oct 12.
When we observe another person's actions, we process many kinds of information - from how their body moves to the intention behind their movements. What kinds of information underlie our intuitive understanding about how similar actions are to each other? To address this question, we measured the intuitive similarities among a large set of everyday action videos using multi-arrangement experiments, then used a modeling approach to predict this intuitive similarity space along three hypothesized properties. We found that similarity in the actors' inferred goals predicted the intuitive similarity judgments the best, followed by similarity in the actors' movements, with little contribution from the videos' visual appearance. In opportunistic fMRI analyses assessing brain-behavior correlations, we found suggestive evidence for an action processing hierarchy, in which these three kinds of action similarities are reflected in the structure of brain responses along a posterior-to-anterior gradient on the lateral surface of the visual cortex. Altogether, this work joins existing literature suggesting that humans are naturally tuned to process others' intentions, and that the visuo-motor cortex computes the perceptual precursors of the higher-level representations over which intuitive action perception operates.
当我们观察他人的行为时，我们会处理很多种信息——从他们的身体动作到动作背后的意图。在我们对相似动作彼此之间的相似程度的直观理解中，哪些信息是基础？为了解决这个问题，我们使用多种排列实验来测量一大组日常动作视频之间的直观相似性，然后使用建模方法来预测这个直观相似性空间，沿着三个假设的属性进行预测。我们发现，推断出的行为者目标的相似性预测了最直观的相似性判断，其次是行为者动作的相似性，而视频的视觉外观几乎没有贡献。在评估大脑-行为相关性的机会性 fMRI 分析中，我们发现了行动处理层次结构的暗示性证据，在这种结构中，这三种行动相似性反映在沿着外侧视觉皮层的后到前梯度的大脑反应结构中。总的来说，这项工作加入了现有的文献，表明人类天生就善于处理他人的意图，并且视动皮层计算出了直观动作感知所依赖的更高层次表象的感知前体。
