Authors: David Dignath Andreas B Eder
Publish Date: 2013/09/17
Volume: 231, Issue: 1, Pages: 75-83
Abstract
Previous studies showed that initial comfort of a posture is traded for a better control at the end position a phenomenon which has been termed the endstate comfort effect When participants recall a recently performed motor plan the endstate comfort effect is reduced Two experiments investigated whether observing the grasp of another person is sufficient for later recall Participants moved an object from a home location to different target positions Results replicated an endstate comfort effect revealing an inverse relation of grasp height to target height for the first movement When participants later returned the object back to the home position recall of the previously selfperformed action dominated replicating the reduction in endstate comfort due to recall processes Notably the endstate comfort effect was also reduced in conditions in which a model performed the first movement and in which the participant performed only the second movement Experiment 1 Model actions were also recalled in situations in which the observed action was incongruent with a comfortable end position of the participant Experiment 2 These results suggest that observed actions of others can serve as templates for movement planning in social situationsThis research was supported by a Grant of the German Research Foundation DFG to Andreas Eder ED 201/21 We thank Oliver Herbort for helpful discussions of this research David Rosenbaum and Robrecht van der Wel for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article and Svenja Gerlich and Felix Debuschewitz for their help conducting the experiments
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