Predicting others' actions from their social contexts.

Contextual cues have been shown to inform our understanding and predictions of others' actions. In this study, we tested whether observers' predictions about unfolding actions depend upon the social context in which they occur. Across five experiments, we showed participants videos of an actor walking toward a piece of furniture either with (joint context) or without (solo context) a partner standing by it.

Potential benefits of synchronous action observation and motor imagery: a commentary on Eaves et al. 2022.

In a recent Psychological Research article, Eaves et al. (2022) review the literature on how motor imagery (MI) practice combined with action observation (AO) enhances motor performance. The authors propose that the synchronous form of AO and MI (AOMI) affords unique benefits to performance that are not possible when the two interventions are performed asynchronously.

Pixel asymmetry predicts between-object differences in the object-based compatibility effect.

When participants make left/right responses to unimanually graspable objects, response times (RTs) are faster when the responding hand is aligned with the viewed object's handle. This (CE) is often attributed to motor activation elicited by the object's afforded grasp. However, some evidence suggests that the object-based CE is an example of , or , elicited by the protruding nature of objects' handles.

A meta-analysis of the object-based compatibility effect.

The object-based compatibility effect (CE) describes, in the context of two-choice keypress tasks, the facilitation of response times (RTs) by the correspondence between participants' response hand and the task-irrelevant orientation of a viewed object's handle. Object-based CEs are often attributed to affordance perception. Although the object-based CE paradigm is the major RT task used to study affordances, failures to replicate the effect have raised questions about its robustness.

Sidestepping spatial confounds in object-based correspondence effects: The Bimanual Affordance Task (BMAT).

Tucker and Ellis found that when participants made left/right button-presses to indicate whether objects were upright or inverted, responses were faster when the response hand aligned with the task-irrelevant handle orientation of the object. The effect of handle orientation on response times has been interpreted as evidence that individuals perceive grasp when viewing briefly presented objects, which in turn activate grasp-related motor systems. Although the effect of handle alignment has since been replicated, there remains doubt regarding the extent to which the effect is indeed driven by affordance perception.