The influence of perspective and spatial congruence on action observation

Details

Supervisors

Hardwick, Robert

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences biomédicales, à finalité approfondie

Abstract

Action observation allows us to imitate, understand, and react to actions performed by others. Previous research indicates that action observation is sensitive to factors such as the perspective and the spatial congruence of the observed stimulus, but has not examined possible interactions between these effects in detail. It is these two parameters and the influence they may have on action observation that we sought to investigate in our experiment. The first part of our study consisted of a simple reaction time task where participants were asked to observe images of hands flexing a finger, and to respond with the corresponding finger. The results show that there is an effect of perspective on participants' reaction time, with shorter reaction times and lower error rates for images in first person perspective than for those in third person perspective. There is also an interaction effect between perspective and the laterality of the observed hand; responses in the first person perspective were generally faster and more accurate when responding to images of right hands compared to left hands, while in the third person perspective responses were better when responding to left hands compared to right hands. A control condition using letters as stimuli showed a similar pattern of results, suggesting an effect related to the spatial congruence between the stimulus and the required response. In the second part of our study, we imposed limited reaction times on the participants to see the evolution of the percentage of correct responses as a function of the time the participants had to respond. This replicated the effects of perspective and spatial congruence observed in experiment 1, with control stimuli showing the same pattern for spatial congruence. Notably, we also observed a decrease in the percentage of correct responses at very short response latency for letter images when the stimuli were spatially incongruent – a phenomenon that was not present for the hand images. The data are discussed in relation to an inhibition phenomenon due to the activation of the action observation system only for the hands images and not for the letter images. These results suggest that perspective and spatial congruence can have an important impact on our capacity to imitate actions, a finding which could have implications on learning movements through demonstrations, and in rehabilitation.