title: Perspective taking promotes action understanding and learning.
abstract: People often learn actions by watching others. The authors propose and test the hypothesis that perspective taking promotes encoding a hierarchical representation of an actor's goals and subgoals-a key process for observational learning. Observers segmented videos of an object assembly task into coarse and fine action units. They described what happened in each unit from either the actor's, their own, or another observer's perspective and later performed the assembly task themselves. Participants who described the task from the actor's perspective encoded actions more hierarchically during observation and learned the task better.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. scl@psych.stanford.edu
authors.forename: Sandra C
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Lozano
authors.forename: Bridgette Martin
authors.initials: BM
authors.lastname: Hard
authors.forename: Barbara
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Tversky
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention; D006040:Goals; D006801:Humans; D007100:Imitative Behavior; D033182:Intention; D016014:Linear Models; D019370:Observation; D011930:Reaction Time; D012691:Serial Learning; D012938:Social Perception; D013028:Space Perception