School of Psychology, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland.
School of Psychology, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland.
Cognition. 2024 Jan;242:105652. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105652. Epub 2023 Oct 20.
Understanding what others are doing is an essential aspect of social cognition that depends on our ability to quickly recognize and categorize their actions. To effectively study action recognition we need to understand how actions are bounded, where they start and where they end. Here we borrow a conceptual approach - the notion of 'canonicality' - introduced by Palmer and colleagues in their study of object recognition and apply it to the study of action recognition. Using a set of 50 video clips sourced from stock photography sites, we show that many everyday actions - transitive and intransitive, social and non-social, communicative - are characterized by 'canonical moments' in a sequence of movements that are agreed by participants to 'best represent' a named action, as indicated in a forced choice (Exp 1, n = 142) and a free choice (Exp 2, n = 125) paradigm. In Exp 3 (n = 102) we confirm that canonical moments from action sequences are more readily named as depicting specific actions and, mirroring research in object recognition, that such canonical moments are privileged in memory (Exp 4, n = 95). We suggest that 'canonical moments', being those that convey maximal information about human actions, are integral to the representation of human action..
理解他人的行为是社会认知的一个重要方面，这取决于我们快速识别和分类他们行为的能力。为了有效地研究动作识别，我们需要了解动作是如何被限定的，它们从哪里开始，又在哪里结束。在这里，我们借鉴了 Palmer 及其同事在研究物体识别时提出的一个概念性方法——“典范性”概念，并将其应用于动作识别的研究中。我们使用了一组从库存照片网站上获取的 50 个视频片段，展示了许多日常动作——及物和不及物的、社交和非社交的、交际的——在一系列动作中都有“典范时刻”，这些时刻被参与者一致认为“最能代表”一个被命名的动作，就像在强制选择（实验 1，n=142）和自由选择（实验 2，n=125）范式中所指示的那样。在实验 3（n=102）中，我们证实了来自动作序列的典范时刻更容易被命名为描绘特定的动作，并且与物体识别研究相呼应的是，这些典范时刻在记忆中是有特权的（实验 4，n=95）。我们认为，“典范时刻”，即那些传达人类行为最大信息量的时刻，是人类行为表现的重要组成部分。
