Communicative Interactions Improve Visual Detection of Biological Motion

By Valeria Manera, Cristina Becchio, Ben Schouten, Bruno G. Bara, K. Verfaillie. 2011

84 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background In the context of interacting activities requiring close-body contact such as fighting or dancing, the actions of one agent can be used to predict the actions of the second agent [1]. In the present study, we investigated whether interpersonal predictive coding extends to interactive activities – such as communicative interactions - in which no physical contingency is implied between the movements of the interacting individuals. Methodology/Principal Findings Participants observed point-light displays of two agents (A and B) performing separate actions. In the communicative condition, the action performed by agent B responded to a communicative gesture performed by agent A. In the individual condition, agent A's communicative action was substituted with a non-communicative action. Using a simultaneous masking detection task, we demonstrate that observing the communicative gesture performed by agent A enhanced visual discrimination of agent B. Conclusions/Significance Our finding complements and extends previous evidence for interpersonal predictive coding, suggesting that the communicative gestures of one agent can serve as a predictor for the expected actions of the respondent, even if no physical contact between agents is implied.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Theory of Mind: A Neural Prediction Problem (2013, positive): “two people engage in part of a cooperative action or conversation, participants are faster and more accurate when both agents are behaving as expected (e.g., responding aggressively or cooperatively, responding communicatively or non-communicatively, or right away, instead of too early or late; Mane”
The role of prediction in social neuroscience (2012, background): “It has been shown that synchronized and communicative interaction can influence visual discrimination performance (Neri et al., 2006), and improve visual detection of biological motion (Manera et al., 2011), respectively.”