Oxyopia Abstract

March 17, 2006
Friday, 4 PM
489 Minor Hall

Peter Neri, D.Phil.
Levi Laboratory, School of Optometry, University of California, Berkeley
Host: Dennis Levi

Title

Meaningful interactions can enhance visual discrimination of human agents

Abstract

The ability to interpret and predict other people's actions is especially evolved in humans, and plays a central role in their high-level cognitive behaviour. However, there is no direct evidence that this ability confers a tangible benefit to low-level sensory processing. In this study we demonstrate that visual discrimination of a human agent is influenced by the presence of a second agent, and depends on whether they interact in a meaningful synchronized fashion that allows the actions of one agent to serve as predictors for the expected actions of the other agent. This effect was observed even though synchronization was irrelevant to the visual discrimination task. Our results demonstrate that action understanding has a pervasive and significant impact on the human ability to extract visual information from the actions of other humans, providing quantitative evidence for its potential evolutionary significance.

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