Action embodiment of expert athletes in congruent and incongruent contexts

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2020

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The current study explored how people embody the motor characteristics of another person’s skilled motor behavior when viewing static images of them in varying contexts and actions. Across two experiments, participants identified famous tennis and soccer players with either hand or foot responses. These athletes were seen either carrying out or not, their sport-oriented actions in contexts in which these actions are typically seen (e.g., a professional tennis player playing tennis) or in a different sporting context that typically requires the use of the other response effector (e.g., a professional tennis player playing soccer). The findings indicated that when participants had limited prior knowledge of the athletes, they responded more quickly with the response effectors that matched the context-oriented action in both congruent-contexts (e.g., hand-responses to tennis contexts) and incongruent-contexts (e.g., foot-responses to soccer contexts), regardless of which athlete was present. Additionally, while the context manipulation did interfere with the participant’s motor response associated with the player identity (i.e., slower overall to professional tennis player playing soccer), responses were faster for effectors associated with the context-oriented action rather than the player’s identity-oriented action. Strikingly, however, in Experiment 2 there was evidence for a reversal in this context congruency effect when the participants knew the identity of these athletes, with the emergence of what has been referred to as a social contrast effect, as participants exhibited slower compatible responses (e.g., hand response to professional tennis players) when compared with incompatible conditions (e.g., foot responses to professional tennis players). These results corroborate previous claims indicating that people hold motoric knowledge of the actions typically performed by others and that these actions are part of their sensorimotor representations, which in this case leads to inhibitory priming effects resulting from rapid and automatic social comparisons.

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Psychology, Action perception, Affordances, Embodied cognition, Motor priming

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64 pages

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