Familiar Actions Research Articles

Congruent Activity during Action and Action Observation in Motor Cortex

A variety of studies have shown that motor cortical areas can be activated by observation of familiar actions. Here, we describe single-neuron responses in monkey primary motor (MI) and dorsal premotor (PMd) cortices during passive observation and execution of a familiar task. We show that the spiking modulation, preferred directions, and encoded information of cells in MI and PMd remain consistent during both observation and movement. Furthermore, we find that the presence of a visual target is necessary to elicit this congruent neural activity during observation. These findings along with results from our analysis of the oscillatory power in the beta frequency of the local field potential are consistent with previous imaging and EEG studies that have suggested that congruence between observation and action is a general feature of the motor system, even outside of canonical "mirror" areas. Such congruent activity has proposed relevance to motor learning, mimicry, and communication and has practical applications for the development of motor-cortical neuroprostheses in paralyzed patients.

Exploring the use of a mobile robot as an imitation agent with children with low-functioning autism

Unpredictability and complexity of social interactions are important challenges for a low functioning autistic child. The objective of this research is to study how a mobile robot can, by appearing more predictable, appealing and simple than a human being, facilitate reciprocal interaction such as imitative play. By conducting an exploratory study involving four children, we found that forms of shared conventions such as imitation of body movements and of familiar actions are higher with two children paired with a human mediator, compared to two children paired with a robot mediator. However, the two children paired with the robot mediator demonstrated increased shared attention (visual contact, physical proximity) and imitate facial expressions (smile) more than the children paired with the human mediator.

Cortical mechanism of communicative speech production

Communicative speech requires conformity not only to linguistic rules but also to behavior that is appropriate for social interaction. The existence of a special brain mechanism for such behavioral aspects of communicative speech has been suggested by studies of social impairment in autism, and it may be related to communicative vocalization in animals. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure cortical activation while normal subjects casually talked to an actor (communication task) or verbally described a situation (description task) while observing video clips of an action performed by a familiar or an unfamiliar actor in a typical daily situation. We assumed that the communication task differed from the description task in the involvement of behavioral aspects of communicative speech production, which may involve the processing of interaction-relevant biographical information. Significantly higher activation was observed during the communication task than during the description task in the medial prefrontal cortex (polar and dorsal parts), the bilateral anterior superior temporal sulci, and the left temporoparietal junction. The results suggest that these regions play a role in the behavioral aspects of communicative speech production, presumably in understanding of the context of the social interaction. The activation of the polar part of the medial prefrontal cortex during the communication task was greater when the actor was familiar than when the actor was unfamiliar, suggesting that this region is involved in communicative speech production with reference to biological information. The precuneus was activated during the communication task only with the familiar actor, suggesting that this region is related to access to biographical information per se.

A BIOLOGICALLY INSPIRED METHOD FOR CONCEPTUAL IMITATION USING REINFORCEMENT LEARNING

Learning by imitation can provide agents with a natural and effective means for transferring knowledge when brain-to-brain connection is infeasible. Natural mechanisms for imitation demonstrate strong abstraction and conceptualization capabilities, however, computational models that have been proposed for imitative learning barely address these fundamental features. Inspired by functions of human brain constituents and exploiting ideas enthused by mirror neurons and the multi-store model of memory, we propose a new model for learning by imitation capable of developing relational concepts. In our model, memory gradually organizes sensory data into concepts through reinforcement learning and consolidation, while mirror neurons maintain an extendible repertoire of familiar actions connected to corresponding concepts. We also discuss the relation between modeling behavior of concept-oriented agents in terms of mathematical functions and relevant biological evidence of mirror neurons. Eventually, we evaluate our method in a phoneme acquisition experiment through real interaction with humans.

Actors and actions: The role of agent behavior in infants’ attribution of goals

Twelve-month-old infants attribute goals to both familiar, human agents and unfamiliar, non-human agents. They also attribute goal-directedness to both familiar actions and unfamiliar ones. Four conditions examined information 12-month-olds use to determine which actions of an unfamiliar agent are goal-directed. Infants who witnessed the agent interact contingently with a human confederate encoded the agent's actions as goal-directed; infants who saw a human confederate model an intentional stance toward the agent without the agent's participation, did not. Infants who witnessed the agent align itself with one of two potential targets before approaching that target encoded the approach as goal-directed; infants who did not observe the self-alignment did not encode the approach as goal-directed. A possible common underpinning of these two seemingly independent sources of information is discussed.

Effects of familiarity on mothers' talk about nouns and verbs

Modifications mothers make when talking to young English-speaking children between the ages of 1;8 and 3;0 (average age = 2;4) about words perceived to be familiar versus unfamiliar were investigated. Nineteen mothers and their children participated in two toy play tasks; one designed to elicit talk about familiar and unfamiliar animals and the other designed to elicit talk about familiar and unfamiliar actions. It was found that mothers' talk involving unfamiliar words differed from talk involving familiar words in a number of ways. Some modifications served to highlight the unfamiliar word which could assist in segmenting the unfamiliar word and mapping it to its referent. Compared to familiar nouns and verbs, unfamiliar nouns and verbs were produced more frequently in highly salient utterance positions and were paired more consistently with a clear nonverbal referent. Familiar nouns but, not verbs, were produced in longer utterances than unfamiliar nouns which could support the child's elaboration of the lexical representation of the familiar word.

Will any doll do? 12-month-olds’ reasoning about goal objects

Infants as young as 5 months of age view familiar actions such as reaching as goal-directed ( Woodward, 1998), but how do they construe the goal of an actor’s reach? Six experiments investigated whether 12-month-old infants represent reaching actions as directed to a particular individual object, to a narrowly defined object category (e.g., an orange dump truck), or to a more broadly defined object category (e.g., any truck, vehicle, artifact, or inanimate object). The experiments provide evidence that infants are predisposed to represent reaching actions as directed to categories of objects at least as broad as the basic level, both when the objects represent artifacts (trucks) and when they represent people (dolls). Infants do not use either narrower category information or spatiotemporal information to specify goal objects. Because spatiotemporal information is central to infants’ representations of inanimate object motions and interactions, the findings are discussed in relation to the development of object knowledge and action representations.

The early origins of goal attribution in infancy

We contrast two positions concerning the initial domain of actions that infants interpret as goal-directed. The ‘narrow scope’ view holds that goal-attribution in 6- and 9-month-olds is restricted to highly familiar actions (such as grasping) (Woodward, Sommerville, & Guajardo, 2001). The cue-based approach of the infant’s ‘teleological stance’ (Gergely & Csibra, 2003), however, predicts that if the cues of equifinal variation of action and a salient action effect are present, young infants can attribute goals to a ‘wide scope’ of entities including unfamiliar human actions and actions of novel objects lacking human features. It is argued that previous failures to show goal-attribution to unfamiliar actions were due to the absence of these cues. We report a modified replication of Woodward (1999) showing that when a salient action-effect is presented, even young infants can attribute a goal to an unfamiliar manual action. This study together with other recent experiments reviewed support the ‘wide scope’ approach indicating that if the cues of goal-directedness are present even 6-month-olds attribute goals to unfamiliar actions.

Exploring the Effect of Action Familiarity on SPTs Recall Performance in Alzheimer’s Disease

This study examined the performance of normal controls (NC) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients on free recall, semantic cued recall and object cued recall of both subject-performed tasks (SPTs) and verbal descriptions of actions, by controlling familiarity of actions associated to objects. The results showed that both groups performed better after SPT encoding than after verbal encoding, in all three types of recall. In addition, this SPT advantage was greater for AD patients than for NC in the object cued recall test, emphasizing AD patients’ sensibility to the congruence of cues between encoding and retrieval conditions. Following verbal encoding, NC showed a better recall for less familiar actions than for highly familiar actions, whereas AD patients exhibited the opposite pattern. These results reflect that AD patients did not benefit from a distinctiveness effect at encoding for improving subsequent retrieval of verbal information, probably due to a reduced level of elaboration during encoding. However, there was no effect of action familiarity on recall performance by both groups following SPT encoding. These results suggest that memory for verbal actions and SPTs is governed by different principles. In addition, they demonstrate the robustness of the SPT effect in AD patients, who were able to improve memory performance in the SPT condition not only with highly familiar actions but also with less familiar actions.

Attention and memory for faces and actions in infancy: the salience of actions over faces in dynamic events.

Discrimination and memory for video films of women performing different activities was investigated in 5.5 month-old infants. In Experiment 1, infants (N = 24) were familiarized to the faces of one of three women performing one of three repetitive activities (blowing bubbles, brushing hair, and brushing teeth). Overall, results indicated discrimination and memory for the actions but not the faces after both a 1-min and a 7-week delay. Memory was demonstrated by a visual preference for the novel actions after the 1-min delay and for the familiar actions after the 7-week delay, replicating prior findings that preferences shift as a function of retention time. Experiment 2 (N = 12) demonstrated discrimination and memory for the faces when infants were presented in static poses at the 1-min delay, but not the 7-week delay. In Experiment 3 (N = 18), discrimination of the actions was replicated, but no discrimination among the objects embedded in the actions (hairbrush, bubble wand, toothbrush) was found. These findings demonstrate the attentional salience of actions over faces in dynamic events to 5.5 month-olds. They highlight the disparity between results generated from moving versus static displays in infancy research and emphasize the importance of using dynamic events as a basis for generalizing about perception and memory for events in the real world.

Creating bizarre false memories through imagination.

The present study explored memory for familiar or usual actions (e.g., flip the coin) and bizarre or unusual actions (e.g., sit on the dice). In Session 1, action statements were presented to 210 participants, who had to either perform or imagine those actions. In Session 2, 24 h later, participants imagined performing various actions, some presented in the first session and others totally new. Finally, in Session 3, 2 weeks later, participants were tested on their memory for the original actions. We found that as the number of imaginings increased in Session 2, so did the proportion of did responses to actions that were only imagined or not even presented. This pattern was present for both bizarre and familiar actions. These results demonstrate that bizarre actions may lose the item distinctiveness that is used to make accurate memory decisions after repeated imagination.

Young children can extend motion verbs to point-light displays.

In the first study using point-light displays (lights corresponding to the joints of the human body) to examine children's understanding of verbs, 3-year-olds were tested to see if they could perceive familiar actions that corresponded to motion verbs (e.g., walking). Experiment 1 showed that children could extend familiar motion verbs (e.g., walking and dancing) to videotaped point-light actions shown in the intermodal preferential looking paradigm. Children watched the action that matched the requested verb significantly more than they watched the action that did not match the verb. In Experiment 2, the findings of Experiment 1 were validated by having children spontaneously produce verbs for these actions. The use of point-light displays may illuminate the factors that contribute to verb learning.

NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL EVIDENCE DISTINGUISHING OBJECT SELECTION FROM ACTION (EFFECTOR) SELECTION

We report two sets of data on object and action selection in a patient, ES, with an impaired ability to make task-based actions to objects. In simple action tasks, ES often made familiar actions to objects rather than the action appropriate to the task rule. We show that, despite having impaired selection of action, ES was able to select the target for action (based on salient perceptual differences). Relatively good object selection occurred even when the distractor had a stronger learned response than the target. In addition we show that distractors close to the path of action to a target can compete for, but are rejected from, selection along with any concurrently activated response. Suppression of an activated response improved performance, when the response would have been inappropriate to the task.

Deficits, delays, and distractions: an evaluation of symbolic play and memory in children with autism.

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate symbolic-deficit and memory-deficit hypotheses to account for the cognitive problems seen in children with autism. Experiment 1 tested imitation, in immediate and deferred conditions, of familiar actions with different sets of objects representing the developmental progression from functional to symbolic play. The results showed that the autism group and both their receptive language and nonverbal IQ-matched controls imitated familiar actions with realistic objects (evidence for functional play) and placeholder objects (evidence for symbolic play) after delays ranging from 24 hr to 3 weeks. Experiment 2 tested familiar three-step event sequences in which a placeholder object was substituted for the second step in half the events. The results showed that the autism group remembered as many of the actions with the placeholder objects as their language-matched controls and as many correctly ordered sequences, a finding that supports a symbolic-delay (rather than deficit) hypothesis. These results were obtained in highly structured test situations and sharply contrast with the impairments seen in children with autism who are observed in naturalistic settings. Two interpretations of these findings are offered. First, structured test settings minimize distractions that typically occur in naturalistic settings that may interfere or disrupt symbolic play in children with autism. Second, the results are consistent with an executive function deficit in that the autistic group demonstrated more knowledge in the test settings than they demonstrate spontaneously in naturalistic ones.

Lexical Principles May Underlie the Learning of Verbs

To examine whether children (mean age 34 months) can fast map and extend novel action labels to actions for which they do not already have names, the comprehension of familiar and novel verbs was tested using colored drawings of Sesame Street characters performing both familiar and unfamiliar actions. Children were asked to point to the character "verbing," from among sets of 4 drawings. With familiar words and actions, children made correct choices 97% of the time. With novel action words, children performed at levels mostly significantly above chance, selecting a previously unlabeled action or another token of a just-names action. In a second, control experiment children were asked to select an action from among the same sets of 4 drawings, but they were not given a novel action name. Here children mainly demonstrated performance at levels not significantly different from chance, showing that the results from the main experiment were attributable to the presence of a word in the request. Results of these studies are interpreted as support for the availability of principles to ease verb acquisition.

Very Long-term Recall in Infants: Infantile Amnesia Reconsidered

Subjects who had participated in a study on non-verbal recall before their first birthday returned to the laboratory one year later and were tested for recall of their previous visit. During their previous visit they had shown recall of both familiar and novel actions on a set of novel objects. However, after a year's delay, evidence for recall was found for the familiar actions only. One action in particular was responsible for this finding: feeding a teddy bear with a schematic bottle. The majority of the returning subjects who had been shown this action repeated it after a year, whereas none of the other returning subjects and few of the subjects in the control groups performed this action. The results indicate that young infants have the ability to recall an event both at 11 months of age and after a delay as long as one year. The finding that infants can recall during a period that later becomes inaccessible to memory is important to our understanding of infantile amnesia.

Analysis of continuous box girder bridges including the effects of distortion

Torsional warping and distortion of the cross-section are important features of thin-walled beams and must be considered fully in the design of box girder bridges. A method of elastic analysis is developed based on the stiffness approach which includes the effects of warping torsion and distortion in addition to the more familiar actions of bending moment and torsion. The method, which is applicable to straight single cell box girders with at least one axis of symmetry, is demonstrated here in the analysis of three different box girder models for which experimental or analytical results were already available. The method is shown to be easy and economical to use and provides a physical insight into the structural response of thin-walled box girder bridges under general loading conditions.

Having shaved a kiwi fruit: Memory of unfamiliar subject-performed actions

In an experiment with young and elderly adults, memory of unfamiliar actions performed by the subjects was compared with memory of actions low and high in familiarity, in order further to assess the role of a knowledge base as regards memory material encoded by enacting. Memory of similar actions encoded verbally was also assessed. The findings showed that the type of encoding, as well as familiarity, determined free-recall memory performance. The highest free-recall scores were found for familiar actions encoded by performance, in both an immediate and a delayed free-recall test. Recognition memory was also enhanced by enacting, whereas the influence of familiarity with an item upon recognition performance was limited to actions encoded verbally. The role of familiarity in recognition performance of actions encoded verbally was reversed compared with that in free recall, in that recognition of unfamiliar actions was most effective. Moreover, age-related memory deficits were found in this study. Elderly adults showed a consistently lower level of performance than younger subjects in both types of free-recall test and in the recognition test. This effect of age was found regardless of the type of encoding, demonstrating that age-related memory differences are not compensated by motor encoding. The age effect was also found regardless of familiarity with the items, and was most significant for unfamiliar actions. This demonstrates that elderly adults have particular difficulty in processing unfamiliar memory material.

Redesigned use, a designer's dilemma

In this study the marketing of a new design for a current product turns out to be problematic. The product concerned is a one-serve coffeecreamer cup. The novelty of the design concerns the method of use: the new method design is meant to prevent the frequently experienced spilling of coffee milk. However, existing user habits appear to be strongly adhered to, with the result that familiar actions spoil the benefits aimed at. The less familiar people are with the use of coffeecreamer cups the more receptive they seem to be to the new design. These effects appear to be completely overlooked by the designers. Thus the redesign unintentionally addresses a group of users that is not particularly interesting from a marketing point of view. Here conflicting requirements boil down to a designer's dilemma: close resemblance of a new design to existing products can completely ruin improvements in product-use, whilst dissimilarity with the products that are intended to be replaced may heavily frustrate a successful...

A Spinach with A V on it

To aid young children in learning and using Blissymbols, the characters are often enhanced by the drawing of additional components. Thirty standard or 30 enhanced Blissymbols, designed to represent familiar actions (10), attributes (10), and objects/entities (10), were shown to 20 normal 3-year-old children, who were asked to guess what they mean. Their responses were examined to learn what children perceive when they see such symbols. They mainly identified perceptual features and related elements of symbols to something with which they were familiar. The number of their guesses that referred to the embellishments of the enhanced Blissymbols was twice as great as the number that referred to the standard Blissymbol base. The results are discussed in terms of the role of enhancements and possible applications to symbol introduction, as well as an early glimpse at emerging literacy.