文章基本信息

标题：Watching novice action degrades expert motor performance: Causation between action production and outcome prediction of observed actions by humans
本地全文：下载
作者：Tsuyoshi Ikegami ; Gowrishankar Ganesh
期刊名称：Scientific Reports
电子版ISSN：2045-2322
出版年度：2014
卷号：4
DOI：10.1038/srep06989
出版社：Springer Nature
摘要：Our social skills are critically determined by our ability to understand and appropriately respond to actions performed by others. However despite its obvious importance, the mechanisms enabling action understanding in humans have remained largely unclear. A popular but controversial belief is that parts of the motor system contribute to our ability to understand observed actions. Here, using a novel behavioral paradigm, we investigated this belief by examining a causal relation between action production, and a component of action understanding - outcome prediction , the ability of a person to predict the outcome of observed actions. We asked dart experts to watch novice dart throwers and predict the outcome of their throws. We modulated the feedbacks provided to them, caused a specific improvement in the expert's ability to predict watched actions while controlling the other experimental factors, and exhibited that a change (improvement) in their outcome prediction ability results in a progressive and proportional deterioration in the expert's own darts performance. This causal relationship supports involvement of the motor system in outcome prediction by humans of actions observed in others.