Mimicking and anticipating others’ actions is linked to Social Information Processing

PLOS ONE, Nov 2019

It is widely known that individuals frequently imitate each other in social situations and that such mimicry fulfills an important social role in the sense that it functions as a social glue. With reference to the anticipated action effect, it has recently been demonstrated that individuals do not only imitate others, but also engage in anticipated action before the observed person starts engaging in that action. Interestingly, both phenomena (i.e., mimicry and anticipated action) rely on tracking others’ social behavior. Therefore, in the present research we investigated whether mimicry and anticipated action are related to social abilities as indicated by measures of social intelligence. The results demonstrate for the first time that mimicry as well as anticipated action is correlated with an important aspect of social intelligence—namely the ability to process social information. Theoretical implications and limitations are discussed.

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Mimicking and anticipating others’ actions is linked to Social Information Processing

March Mimicking and anticipating others' actions is linked to Social Information Processing Oliver Genschow 0 1 Sophie Klomfar 1 Ine d'Haene 1 Marcel Brass 1 0 Social Cognition Center Cologne, University of Cologne , Cologne, Germany , 2 Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Medical University of Vienna , Vienna , Austria , 3 Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University , Ghent , Belgium 1 Editor: Alessio Avenanti, University of Bologna , ITALY It is widely known that individuals frequently imitate each other in social situations and that such mimicry fulfills an important social role in the sense that it functions as a social glue. With reference to the anticipated action effect, it has recently been demonstrated that individuals do not only imitate others, but also engage in anticipated action before the observed person starts engaging in that action. Interestingly, both phenomena (i.e., mimicry and anticipated action) rely on tracking others' social behavior. Therefore, in the present research we investigated whether mimicry and anticipated action are related to social abilities as indicated by measures of social intelligence. The results demonstrate for the first time that mimicry as well as anticipated action is correlated with an important aspect of social intelligenceÐnamely the ability to process social information. Theoretical implications and limitations are discussed. - Funding: This work was supported by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (www.snf. ch), grant number PZ00P1_168007. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Introduction Individuals imitate a wide range of different behaviors (e.g., [ 1 ]) including facial expressions [ 2 ], characteristics of language [3±6], emotions (e.g., [7±9]), postures [ 10 ], gestures [ 11 ], complex action patterns [ 12 ] or simple movements [13±17]. In the last decade psychologists investigated the social function of such imitative behavior and demonstrated that imitation acts as a ªsocial glueº (e.g., [ 18,19 ]) in the sense that it bonds humans more strongly together (for a more critical view, see [20]). For example, it has been found that individuals have a stronger tendency to automatically imitate pro-social than anti-social gestures [ 21 ]. Moreover, imitating others increases pro-social behavior [ 22 ], feelings of affiliation [ 23 ], or liking for each other [ 24 ]. When studying imitation in a naturalistic and social context, researchers investigate mimicry (for a more fine-graded definition, see [ 25 ]). Mimicry is usually explained by the so-called perception-behavior link [ 24,26,27 ]. This link assumes that mimicry is based on a shared mental representation of perceived and executed action. That is, the observation of an action primes and thus facilitates the execution of a compatible action, because observed and executed actions activate the same motor representation (see also [28±30]). Indeed, the idea of activated representations that are shared between observer and executer has been confirmed extensively in behavioral studies (for a meta-analysis, see [ 31 ]), fMRI studies (e.g., [ 32,33 ]), motor TMS studies (e.g., [ 34,35 ]), and single-cell recordings in monkeys [ 36 ] as well as humans [ 37 ]. Going one step further, in the last decade, the idea has been put forward that people may not only imitate what others do, but may also anticipate what others might do in the future. For example, predictive coding accounts suggest that predicting others' behavior is an inherent process that is constantly taking place in human brains in order to prepare one's own actions (e.g., [38±40]). Wilson and Knoblich [40] propose a so-called emulator that internally simulates others' action execution. This simulation process then provides immediate information about the ongoing course of the observed action as well as its probable immediate future. Internal modeling allows the observer to rapidly interpret perceptual signals, to react quickly, to disambiguate uncertain situations, and to interpret observed movements that are only partly visible. Recently, we investigated whether individuals would anticipate others' action also on the basis of the interpretation of the other person's nonverbal signals that precede an action and whether such anticipation let people engaging in the anticipated action without the other person ever showing this action [ 41 ]. In two studies, participants observed either a video sequence in which a model was wrinkling the nose or a video in which her hair was falling in her face all couple of seconds. While participants were observing the videos, we videotaped them and then coded how often participants engaged in anticipated actionsÐnamely touching the nose when observing the n (...truncated)


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Oliver Genschow, Sophie Klomfar, Ine d’Haene, Marcel Brass. Mimicking and anticipating others’ actions is linked to Social Information Processing, PLOS ONE, 2018, Volume 13, Issue 3, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0193743