Skip to Main Content
HBS Home
  • About
  • Academic Programs
  • Alumni
  • Faculty & Research
  • Baker Library
  • Giving
  • Harvard Business Review
  • Initiatives
  • News
  • Recruit
  • Map / Directions
Faculty & Research
  • Faculty
  • Research
  • Featured Topics
  • Academic Units
  • …→
  • Harvard Business School→
  • Faculty & Research→
Publications
Publications
  • Article
  • Neuropsychologia

Behavioral and Neural Representations en route to Intuitive Action Understanding

By: Leyla Tarhan, Julian De Freitas and Talia Konkle
  • Format:Print
ShareBar

Abstract

When we observe another person’s actions, we process many kinds of information—from how their body moves to the intention behind their movements. What kinds of information underlie our intuitive understanding about how similar actions are to each other? To address this question, we measured the intuitive similarities among a large set of everyday action videos using multi-arrangement experiments, then used a modeling approach to predict this intuitive similarity space along three hypothesized properties. We found that similarity in the actors’ inferred goals predicted the intuitive similarity judgments the best, followed by similarity in the actors’ movements, with little contribution from the videos’ visual appearance. In opportunistic fMRI analyses assessing brain-behavior correlations, we found evidence for an action processing hierarchy, in which these three kinds of action similarities are reflected in the structure of brain responses along a posterior-to-anterior gradient on the lateral surface of the visual cortex. Altogether, this work joins existing literature suggesting that humans are naturally tuned to process others’ intentions, and that the visuo-motor cortex computes the perceptual precursors of the higher-level representations over which intuitive action perception operates.

Keywords

Action Perception; Intuitive Similarity; Multi-arrangement; fMRI; Representational Similarity Analysis; Behavior; Perception

Citation

Tarhan, Leyla, Julian De Freitas, and Talia Konkle. "Behavioral and Neural Representations en route to Intuitive Action Understanding." Neuropsychologia 163 (December 2021).
  • Read Now

About The Author

Julian De Freitas

Marketing
→More Publications

More from the Authors

    • March 31, 2023
    • Harvard Business Review (website)

    What Is the Optimal Pattern of a Customer Journey?

    By: Julian De Freitas
    • 2023
    • Faculty Research

    Unselfish Alibis Increase Choices of Selfish Autonomous Vehicles

    By: Julian De Freitas
    • January 28, 2023
    • Wall Street Journal

    Will We Blame Self-Driving Cars? A New Study Finds That People Are Likely to Hold Autonomous Vehicles Liable for Accidents Even When They’re Not at Fault

    By: Julian De Freitas
More from the Authors
  • What Is the Optimal Pattern of a Customer Journey? By: Julian De Freitas
  • Unselfish Alibis Increase Choices of Selfish Autonomous Vehicles By: Julian De Freitas
  • Will We Blame Self-Driving Cars? A New Study Finds That People Are Likely to Hold Autonomous Vehicles Liable for Accidents Even When They’re Not at Fault By: Julian De Freitas
ǁ
Campus Map
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
→Map & Directions
→More Contact Information
  • Make a Gift
  • Site Map
  • Jobs
  • Harvard University
  • Trademarks
  • Policies
  • Accessibility
  • Digital Accessibility
Copyright © President & Fellows of Harvard College