Grasping the other's attention: The role of animacy in action cueing of joint attention
Publication year
2011Source
Vision Research, 51, 8, (2011), pp. 940-944ISSN
Publication type
Article / Letter to editor

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Organization
SW OZ DCC CO
Journal title
Vision Research
Volume
vol. 51
Issue
iss. 8
Languages used
English (eng)
Page start
p. 940
Page end
p. 944
Subject
Action, intention, and motor control; DI-BCB_DCC_Theme 2: Perception, Action and ControlAbstract
The current experiment investigates the role of animacy on grasp-cueing effects as investigated in joint attention research. In a simple detection task participants responded to the colour change of one of two objects of identical size. Before the target onset, we presented a cueing stimulus consisting of either two human hands with a small and a large grip aperture (animate condition) or two comparable U-shaped figures with small and large aperture (inanimate condition). Depending on the size of the objects and the arrangement of the apertures (i.e., large aperture to the left and small aperture to the right or vice versa), either the left or right object matched the grasping hand or U-shapes. Our data show that biological grasping actions modulate the observer's attention whereas the perception of inanimate stimuli does not result in a comparable cueing effect. This strong impact of animacy on attentional priming suggests that grasp cueing represents a marker of a joint attention mechanism that involves spontaneous simulation of the observed motor behaviour.
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
- Academic publications [204994]
- Electronic publications [103242]
- Faculty of Social Sciences [27347]
- Open Access publications [71780]
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