Social cognition
Can you tell who an object is for just by watching a hand move?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People could guess, better than chance, whether someone was moving an object for themselves or for a partner just from subtle timing differences in the movement, and those better at reading emotions from eyes were better at it.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Exp 1: observers categorised 30 context-free videos of pick-and-place moves as social or personal, and accuracy was correlated with RME and motor-imagery scores; Exp 2: within-subject manipulation of how much timing information (reaction time, first-movement duration) remained in the clips
- N
- Experiment 1: 25 adults; Experiment 2: 23 different adults, pre-selected for scoring at least 27 on the French RME test; stimuli came from one filmed actor per experiment
- Population
- Healthy young French adults with normal vision, mostly women
- Outcome
- Percentage of videos correctly categorised as social versus personal intention; correlations with Reading the Mind in the Eyes and Movement Imagery Questionnaire scores; self-rated confidence
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Key findings
In Experiment 1 observers were right on 65.7% of clips, above the 50% chance level, and accuracy correlated strongly with Reading the Mind in the Eyes scores (r = 0.677) but not with visual or kinaesthetic imagery. In Experiment 2 accuracy was lower overall and fell as timing cues were removed: 57.5% for original clips, 54.3% with reaction time equalised, and 51.9% (not above chance) when both timing cues were equalised. Confidence did not change across versions, suggesting observers were not aware of which clips were more informative.
Methodology
An actor moved a small wooden dowel to the centre of a table either before using it himself (personal intention) or before his partner used it (social intention), while motion capture recorded his hand. In Experiment 1, 25 adults watched 30 cropped video clips showing only the arm and object and judged which intention each showed; they also completed the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test and a motor-imagery questionnaire. In Experiment 2, 23 new adults judged clips from a different actor in three versions: original, with reaction time equalised, or with both reaction time and the grasping phase equalised, and rated their confidence.
Limitations
Both samples were small and mostly female, and each experiment used a single filmed actor, so the kinematic 'signature' of social intention may be specific to those individuals; the second actor's movements were less distinct and performance was only modestly above chance. The Experiment 1 link between social skill and accuracy is correlational, and Experiment 2 recruited only above-median RME scorers, so it cannot test that link. The task offered just two alternative intentions with no context, so it is unclear how well this ability works in real, richer interactions. Participants' feeling of guessing was only informally recorded in Experiment 1.
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