Seeing by doing: the impact of short-term experience on action understanding

Abstract

The aim of this thesis was to investigate the influence of short-term experience on action understanding. To this end, we conducted three studies in which we employed a block stacking task in a pre-post eye tracking design. We assumed that short-term experience with the block stacking task should activate task-specific action plans supporting a direct matching process during the observation of posttest trials. Specifically, in the first and in the third study we questioned whether short-term experience with the block stacking task would have a task-specific influence on the ability to predict the action goals of the same block stacking task during observation. Results of these two studies indeed indicated that participants who had performed the block stacking task directed their gaze significantly earlier towards the action goals of the block stacking task during post-test trials. However, this effect could only be found in participants older than 10 years of age. Within the second study, we aimed to investigate whether short-term experience would also have a task-specific influence on the extent of surprise when participants observed unexpected action outcomes indicated by pupil dilation. Results of this study revealed that participants’ expectations were violated when they observed unexpected action outcomes, indicated by a pronounced prediction error in form of pupil dilation after unexpected events. However, no influence of short-term experience on pupil dilation could be found. In sum, we were able to demonstrate that different measures of action understanding deliver specific types of information about action understanding. Moreover, we could show that own experience with an action only impacts predictive gaze behavior during the observation of the same action. Crucially, this effect emerges around the age of 11 years, indicating a developmental change during childhood.

Gegenstand dieser Arbeit war die Untersuchung des Einflusses von kurzzeitger Erfahrung auf das Handlungsverständnis. In drei Experimenten wurden antizipatorische Augenbewegungen bzw. die Pupillenweite gemessen, um den spezifischen Einfluss der Erfahrung mit einer Klötzchen-Bau-Aufgabe zu bestimmen. In zwei der drei durchgeführten Experimente dieser Dissertation konnte gezeigt werden, dass kurzfristige Erfahrung einen aufgabenspezifischen Einfluss auf die Latenzzeit der antizipatorischen Augenbewegungen hat. Dieser Effekt trat ab einem Alter von 11 Jahren auf. In einem weiteren Experiment wurde untersucht, ob Handlungserfahrung ebenfalls einen Einfluss auf die Erwartungsverletzung bei fehlerhaft ausgeführten Handlungen hat. Hierzu wurde die Pupillenweite gemessen und die Ergebnisse zeigten, dass Personen mit einer vergrößerten Pupille auf fehlerhaft vorgeführte Handlungen reagierten, allerdings unabhängig von eigener Handlungserfahrung mit der beobachteten Aufgabe.