Inferring another's expectation from action: the role of peripheral sensation

It is unclear how knowledge of one's actions and one's body contribute to the understanding of others' actions. Here we show that two subjects lacking cutaneous touch and sense of movement and position show a selective deficit in interpreting another person's anticipation of weight when seeing him lifting boxes. We suggest that this ability occurs through mental simulation of action dependent on internal motor representations, which require peripheral sensation for their maintenance.

[1]  W. Ritchie Russell,et al.  Studies in Neurology , 1949 .

[2]  J. Winn,et al.  Brain , 1878, The Lancet.

[3]  S. Runeson,et al.  Visual perception of lifted weight. , 1981, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[4]  Y. Lamarre,et al.  Rapid elbow flexion in the absence of proprioceptive and cutaneous feedback. , 1987, Human neurobiology.

[5]  E. Sedgwick,et al.  The perceptions of force and of movement in a man without large myelinated sensory afferents below the neck. , 1992, The Journal of physiology.

[6]  C. Bard,et al.  Weight judgment. The discrimination capacity of a deafferented subject. , 1995, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[7]  J. Gordon,et al.  Impairments of reaching movements in patients without proprioception. II. Effects of visual information on accuracy. , 1995, Journal of neurophysiology.

[8]  D. C. Howell,et al.  Comparing an Individual's Test Score Against Norms Derived from Small Samples , 1998 .

[9]  D. Wilkin,et al.  Neuron , 2001, Brain Research.

[10]  M. Jeannerod.  Neural Simulation of Action: A Unifying Mechanism for Motor Cognition , 2001, NeuroImage.

[11]  A. Craig.  How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body , 2002, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[12]  L. Fogassi,et al.  A Touching Sight SII/PV Activation during the Observation and Experience of Touch , 2004, Neuron.

[13]  R. E Passingham,et al.  Inferring false beliefs from the actions of oneself and others: an fMRI study , 2004, NeuroImage.

[14]  R. Miall,et al.  Evidence of a limited visuo-motor memory used in programming wrist movements , 2004, Experimental Brain Research.

[15]  Uta Frith,et al.  Your Own Action Influences How You Perceive Another Person's Action , 2004, Current Biology.

[16]  G. Knoblich,et al.  The case for motor involvement in perceiving conspecifics. , 2005, Psychological bulletin.

[17]  R. K. Simpson.  Nature Neuroscience , 2022 .