Individual differences in reading social intentions from motor deviants.

Daniel Lewkowicz,Yann Coello,Yvonne N Delevoye-Turrell,Francois Quesque

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01175

Daniel Lewkowicz, Yann Coello + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01175

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Abstract

As social animals, it is crucial to understand others’ intention. But is it possible to detect social intention in two actions that have the exact same motor goal? In the present study, we presented participants with video clips of an individual reaching for and grasping an object to either use it (personal trial) or to give his partner the opportunity to use it (social trial). In Experiment 1, the ability of naïve participants to classify correctly social trials through simple observation of short video clips was tested. In addition, detection levels were analyzed as a function of individual scores in psychological questionnaires of motor imagery, visual imagery, and social cognition. Results revealed that the between-participant heterogeneity in the ability to distinguish social from personal actions was predicted by the social skill abilities. A second experiment was then conducted to assess what predictive mechanism could contribute to the detection of social intention. Video clips were sliced and normalized to control for either the reaction times (RTs) or/and the movement times (MTs) of the grasping action. Tested in a second group of participants, results showed that the detection of social intention relies on the variation of both RT and MT that are implicitly perceived in the grasping action. The ability to use implicitly these motor deviants for action-outcome understanding would be the key to intuitive social interaction.

Highlights

Understanding what a conspecific is doing represents a crucial ability for our everyday social interactions
The scores on the two dimensions of the Movement Imagery Questionnaire were not correlated (R = 0.132, p = 0.527). The aim of this experiment was to test for the individual differences that may be observed in the ability to read social intentions
Given the effort made to produce stimuli presenting an absence of contextual information, this result confirms the idea that motor intention (Méary et al, 2005; Manera et al, 2011; Sartori et al, 2011; Lewkowicz et al, 2013) and social intention can be inferred from the kinematics of a movement, as suggested by Ansuini et al (2015)

Summary

Introduction

Understanding what a conspecific is doing represents a crucial ability for our everyday social interactions. Declarative knowledge (Fehr and Fischbacher, 2004) and indirect interaction (Singer et al, 2004) are indices that are used when judging the reason of others’ behavior. Contextual cues, such as environmental and physical constraints of an action help to detect the aim of observed actions (Brass et al, 2007; Stapel et al, 2012). Experimental evidences support the hypothesis that humans have the ability to predict the action-outcome goals on the basis of the observation of its early kinematics only (Orliaguet et al, 1996; Knoblich and Flach, 2001; Sebanz and Shiffrar, 2009).

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