Abstract
Observing a physical interaction between individuals (e.g., observing friends shaking hands) or between an object and an individual (e.g., observing a teammate striking or being struck with a ball) can lead to somatosensory activation in the observer. However, it is not known whether the speed of the observed interaction modulates such somatosensory activation (e.g., observing a teammate being struck with a slow vs. a fast-moving ball). In three experiments, participants observed a hand or object interact with another hand or object, all presented with a slow- or fast-moving effector. To probe sensorimotor processes during observation, participants were asked to react to an auditory beep (i.e., response time [RT] task) at the moment of observed contact. If observed contact led to increased somatosensory activation, RTs would decrease due to statistical and/ or intersensory facilitation. In all three experiments, RTs were lower when observing fast compared to slow motion stimuli, regardless of the moving (i.e., hand or ball) and target stimulus (i.e., hand or leaf). Further, when only an object (i.e., leaf) was the target, RTs did not differ between the moving hand and moving ball condition. In contrast, when an object (i.e., ball) was used as the moving stimulus, the magnitude of the speed effect (i.e., fast – slow RT difference) was significantly larger when the ball contacted a hand as compared to a leaf. Overall, these results provide novel evidence for a relationship between the observed kinematics of an object–human interaction and the sensorimotor processing in the observer.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Notes
Due to a technical limitation of the programed created in PsyToolkit, response time could not be measured while the hand was moving across the screen (i.e., when the beep was presented at the 9th or 17th frame).
Post-hoc equivalence tests were also conducted for the non-significant main effect of Observed Touch in Experiments 1, 2, and 3 using two one-sided t-tests (TOSTs; Lakens et al., 2018). The equivalence bound set to ± 12.5 ms, which was the smallest difference in RTs across all three experiments for the main effect of speed. For experiment 1, the hand-to-hand and hand-to-leaf conditions difference was significantly greater than the lower bound (tL (17) = 2.3, p = 0.017) and significantly smaller than the upper bound (tU (17) = -3.2, p < 0.01; 90% CI [-9.6, 5.7]). For experiment 2, the hand-to-leaf and ball-to-leaf conditions difference was significantly greater than the lower bound (tL (18) = 2.7, p < 0.01) and significantly smaller than the upper bound (tU (18) = -1.8, p = 0.04; 90% CI [-7.3, 12.0]). For experiment 3, the ball-to-hand and ball-to-leaf conditions difference was significantly greater than the lower bound (tL (13) = 1.9, p = 0.04) and significantly smaller than the upper bound (tU (13) = -3.6, p < 0.01; 90% CI [-11.9, 4.2]). Thus, these analyses suggest that the RTs were both not significantly different (as per the ANOVAs) and statistically equivalent.
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Acknowledgements
Support for this research was provided by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), and the Ontario Research Fund (ORF; all granted to L. Tremblay), an Ontario Graduate Scholarship (granted to D.M. Manzone), and the University of Toronto.
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Funding was provided by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Canadian Foundation for Innovation.
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DMM and LT conceived and designed the research; DMM performed experiments; DMM analyzed data; DMM and LT interpreted the results of the experiments; DMM prepared figures; DMM drafted manuscript; DMM and LT edited and revised the manuscript; DMM and LT approved the final version of manuscript.
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Manzone, D.M., Tremblay, L. Sensorimotor processing is dependent on observed speed during the observation of hand–hand and hand–object interactions. Psychological Research 87, 1806–1815 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-022-01776-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-022-01776-7