Abstract
“Joint attention” refers to changes in one`s own
action potentials after observing somebody else’s
actions. For example, perceived gaze leads to
corresponding attention shifts (Hood et al., 1998;
Schuller and Rossion, 2001), and seeing a taskirrelevant
pointing arm influences directional
judgments (Langton and Bruce, 2000). Observing a
grasping movement induces preparation of similar
actions (Fadiga et al., 1995), and viewing grasping
hands facilitates congruent manual responses
(Craighero et al., 2002). Viewpoint-independent
action simulation through “mirror neurons” has
been suggested as the neural substrate for such
joint attention effects (Decety and Grezes, 1999;
Gallese, 2001; Gallese and Goldman, 1998). Here
we show that joint attention facilitates encoding of
visual information from the target locations of
intended actions. The effect is viewpointindependent
and does not seem to generalize to
completed actions.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 168-170 |
Number of pages | 3 |
Journal | Cortex |
Volume | 40 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2004 |