title: Predicting others' actions: evidence for a constant time delay in action simulation.
abstract: Recent evidence indicates that humans can precisely predict the outcome of occluded actions. It has been suggested that these predictions arise from a mental simulation which might run in real-time. The present experiments aimed to specify the time course of this simulation process. Participants watched transiently occluded point-light actions and the temporal outcome after occlusion was manipulated. Participants were instructed to judge the temporal coherence of the action after a short (Experiment 1) and a long occlusion period (Experiment 2). Both experiments revealed a comparable negative point of subjective equality (PSE), indicating that action simulation took constantly longer than the observed action itself. Such a temporal error was not present when inverted actions were used, (Experiment 3) ruling out a pure visually driven effect. The results suggest that the temporal error is due to costs arising from a switch from action perception to an internal simulation process involving motor representations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Stephanstrasse 1a, 04103, Leipzig, Germany. sparenberg@cbs.mpg.de
authors.forename: Peggy
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Sparenberg
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Springer
authors.forename: Wolfgang
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Prinz
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D013998:Time Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*