Humans are sensitive to attention control when predicting others' actions.

ABSTRACT: Studies of social perception report acute human sensitivity to where another's attention is aimed. Here we ask whether humans are also sensitive to how the other's attention is deployed. Observers viewed videos of actors reaching to targets without knowing that those actors were sometimes choosing to reach to one of the targets (endogenous control) and sometimes being directed to reach to one of the targets (exogenous control). Experiments 1 and 2 showed that observers could respond more rapidly when actors chose where to reach, yet were at chance when guessing whether the reach was chosen or directed. This implicit sensitivity to attention control held when either actor's faces or limbs were masked (experiment 3) and when only the earliest actor's movements were visible (experiment 4). In

SUBMITTER: Pesquita A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4978300 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature