Neuroscience
Training to perform certain movements, even blindfolded, affects our subsequent ability to perceive those same movements when performed by others. That’s according to Antonino Casile and Martin Giese at the University Clinic Tubingen, who say their finding reinforces the notion of an intimate link between how we control our own body and how we perceive the movements of others.
Casile and Giese tested participants’ ability to match images made up of lights that had the appearance of a person walking with one of three different rhythms. Imagine a person walking in the pitch-black darkness with a little light on each of their joints and you have an idea of what these images look like (see here).Participants were shown pairs of these ‘point-light’ images, and had to say in each case whether the two images showed the same walking rhythm or not.
Blindfolded to prevent any visual stimulation, the participants were then taught to walk with one of these awkward, unnatural rhythms. Crucially, when they were subsequently tested on the visual matching again, the participants showed a significant improvement, but only when matching two point-light displays that moved with the same walking rhythm they’d just been trained on. Moreover, motion-capture technology was used to determine how well the participants had learned the walking rhythm, and this showed that the better the participants learned to perform the rhythm, the greater their subsequent improvement in matching the associated point-light displays.
The researchers said “Our study shows, for the first time, a direct and highly selective influence of novel acquired motor programmes on visual action recognition that is independent of visual learning”.
But how does learning a movement affect our perception of that movement? The researchers explained the effect: “…might be mediated by the visual imagination of motor patterns during the motor training”. “Indeed”, they said, “experimental evidence suggests that motor imagination, action perception, and motor production might share common neuronal substrates”.
___________________________________
Casile, A. & Giese, M.A. (2006). Nonvisual motor training influences biological motion perception. Current Biology, 16, 69-74.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Paraplegics Walk In Their Dreams
In the land of dreams, the shackles of disability are cast asunder. That's the revelation from a new dream diary study featuring 15 paraplegics, 5 of whom were born with their condition. These volunteers (aged 22 to 84 years), recruited from a military...
- Sound Aids Visual Learning
The use of sound during visual training can enhance later performance on a purely visual task, a finding that demonstrates just how much multisensory interaction occurs in brain areas that before now were thought to be dedicated solely to vision. Aaron...
- Different Kinds Of Learning Occur During Night And Day
If you are learning a skill such as playing the piano, you have to master the fact-based aspect (the sequence of notes) and also the movement-related aspect (moving your fingers in the correct way on the keys). Both aspects improve during practice, but...
- Help Me Write A Good Lay Summary Of My Coordination Research
I'm writing a grant proposal, and part of the process involves a 4000 character lay summary of the project; what I'm up to, what the objectives are and who the likely beneficiaries are. The goal is for this to be in language a non-expert can understand...
- Coordinated Rhythmic Movement. - An Introduction To An Experimental Paradigm
I have some papers I wanted to talk about, but it occurred to me that they only make sense in a context. So I'm going to spend some time talking about the experimental task I use a lot, why it's interesting and what we can learn from it about...
Neuroscience
How doing affects seeing
Training to perform certain movements, even blindfolded, affects our subsequent ability to perceive those same movements when performed by others. That’s according to Antonino Casile and Martin Giese at the University Clinic Tubingen, who say their finding reinforces the notion of an intimate link between how we control our own body and how we perceive the movements of others.Casile and Giese tested participants’ ability to match images made up of lights that had the appearance of a person walking with one of three different rhythms. Imagine a person walking in the pitch-black darkness with a little light on each of their joints and you have an idea of what these images look like (see here).Participants were shown pairs of these ‘point-light’ images, and had to say in each case whether the two images showed the same walking rhythm or not.
Blindfolded to prevent any visual stimulation, the participants were then taught to walk with one of these awkward, unnatural rhythms. Crucially, when they were subsequently tested on the visual matching again, the participants showed a significant improvement, but only when matching two point-light displays that moved with the same walking rhythm they’d just been trained on. Moreover, motion-capture technology was used to determine how well the participants had learned the walking rhythm, and this showed that the better the participants learned to perform the rhythm, the greater their subsequent improvement in matching the associated point-light displays.
The researchers said “Our study shows, for the first time, a direct and highly selective influence of novel acquired motor programmes on visual action recognition that is independent of visual learning”.
But how does learning a movement affect our perception of that movement? The researchers explained the effect: “…might be mediated by the visual imagination of motor patterns during the motor training”. “Indeed”, they said, “experimental evidence suggests that motor imagination, action perception, and motor production might share common neuronal substrates”.
___________________________________
Casile, A. & Giese, M.A. (2006). Nonvisual motor training influences biological motion perception. Current Biology, 16, 69-74.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Paraplegics Walk In Their Dreams
In the land of dreams, the shackles of disability are cast asunder. That's the revelation from a new dream diary study featuring 15 paraplegics, 5 of whom were born with their condition. These volunteers (aged 22 to 84 years), recruited from a military...
- Sound Aids Visual Learning
The use of sound during visual training can enhance later performance on a purely visual task, a finding that demonstrates just how much multisensory interaction occurs in brain areas that before now were thought to be dedicated solely to vision. Aaron...
- Different Kinds Of Learning Occur During Night And Day
If you are learning a skill such as playing the piano, you have to master the fact-based aspect (the sequence of notes) and also the movement-related aspect (moving your fingers in the correct way on the keys). Both aspects improve during practice, but...
- Help Me Write A Good Lay Summary Of My Coordination Research
I'm writing a grant proposal, and part of the process involves a 4000 character lay summary of the project; what I'm up to, what the objectives are and who the likely beneficiaries are. The goal is for this to be in language a non-expert can understand...
- Coordinated Rhythmic Movement. - An Introduction To An Experimental Paradigm
I have some papers I wanted to talk about, but it occurred to me that they only make sense in a context. So I'm going to spend some time talking about the experimental task I use a lot, why it's interesting and what we can learn from it about...