Object Movement Bearing And Conflicting Action Selection In Conflict Situations

In the perception-action field,the researchers dedicated that observing the object would simultaneously activate the action object afforded,which is called object affordance;and when observing someone execute an action,individuals would automatically imitate what they have observed,known as imitation.When the action activated by observing object compatible with the action simulated by observing hand gesture,which would prompt response of individual.When actions conflict with each other,they would mutual interference with each other and hinder the response of participants.However,in previous study,the presentation style of hand gesture would cause imbalance between hand gestures and objects.And more and more researchers also suggested that in conflict scene,individuals would execute action activated by objects or by hand gestures.Thus in conflict situation,how do we do action selection between the action activated by hand gesture(imitation)and the action activated by objects?To give sound explain,this study manipulated action-activating strength of both objects and hand gestures.Present study included four experiments.Neutral objects,dangerous objects and hand gestures in daily life were used as experimental materials.In all experiments,the object and hand gestures appeared simultaneously,activating the conflict action between left hand and right hand.Participants were asked to use the left or right hand to determine the figure of central imperative stimuli(triangle vs.round),so that the responses of participants would compatible with object or hand gesture.In Experiment 1,the action-activating strength of objects and gestures were manipulated to observe how individuals make action selection.According to the action-activating strength of the objects,objects were divided as positive objects and negative objects(for example,wine divider and wineglass),at same time,gestures would be divided as positive hand gesture and negative hand gesture(graspable hand gesture and flat hand gesture).Experiment 1 indicated that when the response of participants compatible with the action activated by hand gesture,response of participants was faster.That is,compared to action activated by the object(negative object vs.active object),participants remain perform action activated by hand gestures(negative hand gesture vs.positive hand gesture).In Experiment 2,To investigate whether participants would choose to perform the action activated by objects,objects used in Experiment 1 were in a rotation of 20 degrees turned to hand gestures,which will further enhance the action-activating strength of the object,and hand gesture used in Experiment 2 was consistent with which used in Experiment 1.Experiment 2 suggested that although enhanced the action-activating strength of objects(positive objects vs.negative object),participants were still inclined to execute action activated by the hand gesture.In Experiment 3,the action-activating strength of the object was further augment,and the dangerous object with greater action-activating strength was used to replace the negative object used in the first two experiments.The results suggested that the response of the participants was faster when response was compatible with hand gestures,that is to say,the participants still chose to execute the action activated by the hand gestures.In Experiment 4,action-activating strength of hand gesture was reduced by altering visual perspective of hand gesture from 1st person to 3 st person to investigate what action selection participants would make.The results showed that participants tended to conduct the action activated by object with respect to the action activated by hand gestures.Summing up all the results of four experiments,the following conclusions are drawn:In conflict scene,action selection between automatic imitation and object affordance was modulated by the action-activating strength of both objects and hand gestures.(1)Although the action-activating strength of objects is constantly increased,the action activated by hand gesture(imitation)is still be the dominant in the action selection.(2)Only decreasing the action-activating strength of hand gesture,individuals would execute the action activated by the objects.