Abstract
Human beings are social in nature. Interacting with other people using human body is one of the most important activities and abilities in our daily life. To have a coherent visual perception of dynamic actions and engaging in normal social interaction, we have to store these interactive movements into working memory (WM). However, the WM mechanism in processing these interactive biological movements (BMs) remains unknown. In the current study, we explored the representation format of interactive BMs stored in WM, by testing two distinct hypotheses: (1) each interactive BM can be stored as one unit in WM (integrated unit hypothesis); (b) constituents of interactive BMs are stored separately in WM (individual storage hypothesis). In a change detection task, we required the participants to memorize interactive BMs in which two person were in beating, dancing, dashing, drinking, talking, or conversation. We found that there was no difference between memorizing four interactive BMs (containing eight individual BMs) and four individual BMs, and both performances were significantly lower than remembering two interactive BMs (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, we further test whether spatial proximity but not social interaction resulted in the results of Experiment 1, by introducing a random-pair condition in which the social interaction was destroyed but spatial proximity still existed. We found that participants remembered equally well between two interactive BMs and two individual BMs, and both performances were significantly better than remembering two random-pair BMs; there was no difference between memorizing two random-pair BMs and four individual BMs. Together, these results suggest that an interactive biological movement containing two individual moments are stored as one unit in WM.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2016