The functional role of context in action perception and understanding social situations

Author

Anjali -, University of British Columbia, VancouverFollow

Volume

29

Number

1

Department

Dept. of Psychology

Publisher

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Place of Publication

Chattanooga (Tenn.)

Date

2023

Abstract

This study investigated the influence of understanding the perception of action congruency in animated video actors. The study employed a 2 x 2 pre-post design with the type of training (relevant, irrelevant) as a between-subjects design. The present study aimed to address whether the presence (versus absence) of contextual information affected an individual’s ability to make sense of social interactions, and if relevant contextual cues aided an individual’s perspective of social situations. Participants consisted of 80 undergraduate students at the University of British Columbia. Action congruency is the level of social coordination between two figures. Perceptions of action congruency was initially tested in two groups, prior to training half of the participants on social origins of animations (relevant) and the other half on their non-social features (irrelevant). Half of the animations depicted socially collaborative actions and the rest depicted non-collaborative actions. Participants were later tested on the task. Results indicated participants were able to discriminate between congruent and incongruent actions before the training. Results indicated that relevant training increased participant’s sensitivity to action congruency. A repeated measures ANOVA revealed a significant three-way interaction of Stimulus x Session x Training F (1, 69) = 3.16, p = < .001. Findings reveal that although context is not strictly required for the perception of action congruency, context training facilitates these perceptions. Thus, by making participants more aware of incongruent social actions.

Keyword

action congruency; context; social cognition; social coordination

Discipline

Psychology

Document Type

article

DCMI Type

Text

Language

English

Rights

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Recommended Citation

-, Anjali (2023) "The functional role of context in action perception and understanding social situations," Modern Psychological Studies: Vol. 29: No. 1, Article 5.
Available at: https://scholar.utc.edu/mps/vol29/iss1/5