Citation

Macerollo A, Bose S, Ricciardi L, Edwards MJ, Kilner JM. Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci. 2015; 10(8): 1121-1127.

Affiliation

Sobell Department of Motor Neuroscience and Movement Disorders, UCL Institute of Neurology, London UK, WC1N 3BG j.kilner@ucl.ac.uk.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Oxford University Press)

DOI

10.1093/scan/nsu161

PMID

25691777

Abstract

Successful human social interactions depend upon the transmission of verbal and non-verbal signals from one individual to another. Non-verbal social communication is realized through our ability to read and understand information present in other people's actions. It has been proposed that employing the same motor programs we use to execute an action when observing the same action underlies this action understanding. The main prediction of this framework is that action perception should be strongly correlated with parameters of action execution. Here we demonstrate that subjects' sensitivity to observed movement speeds is dependent upon how quickly they themselves executed the observed action. This result is consistent with the motor theory of social cognition and suggests that failures in non-verbal social interactions between individuals may in part result from differences in how those individuals move.

Language: en