Watching novice action degrades expert motor performance: causation between action production and outcome prediction of observed actions by humans.

ABSTRACT: Our social skills are critically determined by our ability to understand and appropriately respond to actions performed by others. However despite its obvious importance, the mechanisms enabling action understanding in humans have remained largely unclear. A popular but controversial belief is that parts of the motor system contribute to our ability to understand observed actions. Here, using a novel behavioral paradigm, we investigated this belief by examining a causal relation between action production, and a component of action understanding--outcome prediction, the ability of a person to predict the outcome of observed actions. We asked dart experts to watch novice dart throwers and predict the outcome of their throws. We modulated the feedbacks provided to them, caused a specific impr

SUBMITTER: Ikegami T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4227030 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature