Is social inhibition of return due to action co-representation?
Section snippets
General introduction
The past decade has seen increasing interest in the effect of interpersonal interaction on human cognition (Atmaca et al., 2011, Atmaca et al., 2008, Frischen et al., 2009, Schuch and Tipper, 2007, Tsai et al., 2011, Welsh et al., 2005). Such research has revealed novel insights concerning cognitive processes that have previously been studied with individuals, including visual attention and motor performance. Focusing upon the latter behaviors, recent interest in ‘joint action’ is in part due
Experiment 1
Experiment 1 tested the action co-representation accounts of social IOR by having participants make identical responses to one another. As set out above, no modulation of the basic effect should be observed under such conditions. Furthermore, whilst the action factor was kept constant we manipulated the visual factors known to influence IOR. Specifically, we examined whether the perceptual grouping of stimuli influenced the effect. It is well established that preattentive segmentation processes
Experiment 2
Experiment 1 showed that, contrary to the pure co-representation account of the phenomenon (Ondobaka et al., 2012), social IOR can be modulated by perceptual grouping processes. This occurred independently of the kind of action that participants performed. Nonetheless, it is still possible that the effect occurs as a result of shared perceptuo-motor representations, but these representations may be sensitive to action effects and stimuli, including the presence of objects (e.g., Johnson-Frey et
Experiment 3
In Experiments 1 and 2 the actions performed by participants were the same (i.e., same location or different location with respect to the previous response) with only the stimuli and/or task demands being different. In Experiment 3 this was reversed so that the stimuli were the same across all conditions but the actions performed were different. The congruency of observed and performed actions was manipulated such that on half of the trials the co-actors performed the same actions while on the
General discussion
A number of studies have now demonstrated that people are slower to respond to stimuli that have been previously responded to by another individual. Two related accounts have suggested that this ‘social IOR’ effect (Skarratt et al., 2010) is due to co-representing an observed action. The present work investigated whether any form of action co-representation is needed for social IOR to occur. In Experiment 1, participants alternated responses to target stimuli that differed in their perceptual
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Cited by (20)
Biological motion elicits between-person Inhibition of Return in temporal and spatial movement parameters
2022, Acta PsychologicaCitation Excerpt :e.g., Welsh et al., 2005). IoR has been studied extensively in individuals acting alone (e.g., Posner & Cohen, 1984; for review see Klein, 2000 for a review), and more recently in social contexts (Atkinson, Simpson, Skarratt, & Cole, 2014; Doneva, Atkinson, Skarratt, & Cole, 2017; Skarratt, Cole, & Kingstone, 2010; Welsh et al., 2005; Welsh et al., 2007; Welsh, McDougall, & Weeks, 2009; for recent review see Cole, Skarratt, & Welsh, 2019). In the typical IoR paradigm, participants respond to targets presented at short (50–300 ms) or longer (300 + ms) intervals after the onset of non-predictive cue stimuli appearing at potential target locations.
Susceptibility to the fusion illusion is modulated during both action execution and action observation
2020, Acta PsychologicaCitation Excerpt :Nonetheless future work could directly address and contrast these potential accounts. It should be noted that similar concerns regarding the mere presence of other visual stimuli have been raised by other researchers who have critically evaluated the accounts of other social phenomena like the joint Simon effect (Sebanz et al., 2003 vs. Dolk, Hommel, Prinz, & Liepelt, 2013) and the social inhibition of return effect (Welsh et al., 2005 vs. Atkinson, Simpson, Skarratt, & Cole, 2014). It is the case that an experimental design which can effectively distinguish between the mere effects of motion alone and movement of a limb remain elusive due to the overlapping nature of the characteristics of the two categories of stimuli and potential influence of top-down influences of belief in the animacy of the stimulus (see Chandler-Mather, Welsh, Sparks, & Kritikos, in press).
The sociality of social inhibition of return
2020, CognitionCitation Excerpt :Note that in contrast to the co-representation account, according to this proposal, the response location is not important, just the motor action, and the mechanism that produces SIOR is facilitation of action (within an egocentric view), and it is not an inhibitory process. Alternatively, Cole and colleagues (Atkinson, Simpson, Skarratt, & Cole, 2014; Cole, Atkinson, D’Souza, Welsh, & Skarratt, 2012, 2018) claim that SIOR is IOR-like. That is the SIOR effect is not due to action representation process but may result from another mechanism: the attentional shift hypothesis, also being called the transient account (Atkinson, Millett, Doneva, Simpson, & Cole, 2018; Cole et al., 2012, 2019).
Biological motion and animacy belief induce similar effects on involuntary shifts of attention
2020, Attention, Perception, and PsychophysicsProbing the time course of facilitation and inhibition in gaze cueing of attention in an upper-limb reaching task
2019, Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics