Response and conflict expectations shape motor responses interactively.

Efficient responses in dynamic environments rely on a combination of readiness and flexibility, regulated by anticipatory and online response control mechanisms. The latter are required when a motor response needs to be reprogrammed or when flanker stimuli induce response conflict and they are crucially modulated by anticipatory signals such as response and conflict expectations. The mutual influence and interplay of these control processes remain to be elucidated.

Decoding spatiotemporal features of emotional body language in social interactions.

How are emotions perceived through human body language in social interactions? This study used point-light displays of human interactions portraying emotional scenes (1) to examine quantitative intrapersonal kinematic and postural body configurations, (2) to calculate interaction-specific parameters of these interactions, and (3) to analyze how far both contribute to the perception of an emotion category (i.e. anger, sadness, happiness or affection) as well as to the perception of emotional valence.

When the timing is right: The link between temporal coupling in dyadic interactions and emotion recognition.

Affective states can be understood as dynamic interpersonal processes developing over time and space. When we observe emotional interactions performed by other individuals, our visual system anticipates how the action will unfold. Thus, it has been proposed that the process of emotion perception is not only a simulative but also a predictive process - a phenomenon described as interpersonal predictive coding.

Does co-presence affect the way we perceive and respond to emotional interactions?

This study compared how two virtual display conditions of human body expressions influenced explicit and implicit dimensions of emotion perception and response behavior in women and men. Two avatars displayed emotional interactions (angry, sad, affectionate, happy) in a "pictorial" condition depicting the emotional interactive partners on a screen within a virtual environment and a "visual" condition allowing participants to share space with the avatars, thereby enhancing co-presence and agency. Subsequently to stimulus presentation, explicit valence perception and response tendency (i.

Practice modality of motor sequences impacts the neural signature of motor imagery.

Motor imagery is conceptualized as an internal simulation that uses motor-related parts of the brain as its substrate. Many studies have investigated this sharing of common neural resources between the two modalities of motor imagery and motor execution. They have shown overlapping but not identical activation patterns that thereby result in a modality-specific neural signature.

Sensory features of mental images in the framework of human actions.

What determines the sensory impression of a self-generated motor image? Motor imagery is a process in which subjects imagine executing a body movement with a strong kinesthetic and/or visual component from a first-person perspective. Both sensory modalities can be combined flexibly to form a motor image. 90 participants of varying ages had to freely generate motor images from a large set of movements.

Emotional expressivity of the observer mediates recognition of affective states from human body movements.

Research on human motion perception shows that people are highly adept at inferring emotional states from body movements. Yet, this process is mediated by a number of individual factors and experiences. Within this study, we tackle two questions.

Subjective vividness of motor imagery has a neural signature in human premotor and parietal cortex.

Motor imagery (MI) is the process in which subjects imagine executing a body movement with a strong kinesthetic component from a first-person perspective. The individual capacity to elicit such mental images is not universal but varies within and between subjects. Neuroimaging studies have shown that these inter-as well as intra-individual differences in imagery quality mediate the amplitude of neural activity during MI on a group level.

Imagined and Executed Actions in the Human Motor System: Testing Neural Similarity Between Execution and Imagery of Actions with a Multivariate Approach.

Simulation theory proposes motor imagery (MI) to be a simulation based on representations also used for motor execution (ME). Nonetheless, it is unclear how far they use the same neural code. We use multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) and representational similarity analysis (RSA) to describe the neural representations associated with MI and ME within the frontoparietal motor network.