title: Decoding intentions from movement kinematics.
abstract: How do we understand the intentions of other people? There has been a longstanding controversy over whether it is possible to understand others' intentions by simply observing their movements. Here, we show that indeed movement kinematics can form the basis for intention detection. By combining kinematics and psychophysical methods with classification and regression tree (CART) modeling, we found that observers utilized a subset of discriminant kinematic features over the total kinematic pattern in order to detect intention from observation of simple motor acts. Intention discriminability covaried with movement kinematics on a trial-by-trial basis, and was directly related to the expression of discriminative features in the observed movements. These findings demonstrate a definable and measurable relationship between the specific features of observed movements and the ability to discriminate intention, providing quantitative evidence of the significance of movement kinematics for anticipating others' intentional actions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Torino, Torino, Italy.
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cavallo
authors.affiliation: C'MON, Cognition, Motion and Neuroscience Unit, Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy.
authors.forename: Atesh
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Koul
authors.affiliation: C'MON, Cognition, Motion and Neuroscience Unit, Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy.
authors.forename: Caterina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Ansuini
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montréal, Canada.
authors.forename: Francesca
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Capozzi
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Torino, Torino, Italy.|C'MON, Cognition, Motion and Neuroscience Unit, Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy.
authors.forename: Cristina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Becchio