Sources of information for discriminating dynamic human actions

摘要

Despite the importance of action identification and discrimination in action perception andsocial cognition more broadly, little research has investigated how these processes areachieved. To this end, we sought to identify the extent to which adults capitalize on featur-al versus configural sources of information when discriminating small-scale human actionssuch as grasp and place. Results across two experiments indicate adults are sensitive toboth sources of information in action discrimination, but selectively attend to featural overconfigural action information. The findings also parallel what is known regarding face pro-cessing: processing of configural information is especially disrupted by inversion, whereasprocessing of featural information is specifically affected by low-pass filtering.