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Poster E in Poster Session E: Thursday, August 6, 10:30 am – 12:15 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Reading Upper Body Movements Improves Prediction and Limits Deception in a Competitive Reaching Task

Anna Filina¹, Maryam Vaziri-Pashkam¹; ¹University of Delaware

Presenter: Anna Filina

In daily interactions, we often have to read others’ body movements to predict their goals. To understand how humans predict actions when deceptive movements are possible, we designed a competitive reaching task in which participants competed in reaching for one of two targets while they were allowed to deceive each other. To determine how access to upper body movements outside the finger affects performance in this task, in a control task, participants responded to a dot representing the finger movements from the main task on a computer screen. Reaction times were faster when participants had access to full upper body movements compared to when they responded to the moving dot on the screen. This advantage was stronger in deception trials. These results demonstrate that access to full upper body movements is critical for predicting others’ goals, especially in the presence of deception.

Topic Area: Decision-Making, Cognitive Control & Event Cognition