Contemporary action understanding research has shown that cues guide our interpretation and prediction of others’ actions. This group of talks seeks to show the range kinds of cues that shape our action understanding, and the mechanisms by which they do so.

Mechanisms underlying forward simulation in action understanding
Dr Francesco Iani – Universita Di Torino
During action observation, people represent the observed action unfolding in time and this representation speeds up the recognition of the next action states compared to the backward states. In this talk we will discuss the nature of this mental stimulation as well as the possible mechanisms underlying action anticipation. We hypothesize that there are at least two processes: (1) an action prediction mechanism, by which people simulate the next states of the observed action through a representation of the action unfolding in time; (2) a goal prediction mechanism, by which people infer the final goal of the observed action based on the physical properties of the object.

Cues to other's higher-order mental states inform action predictions
Dr Katrina McDonough – University of Aberdeen
How we perceive and interpret the actions of others depends not only on action observations, but also action predictions. Here we show that cues to other's higher-order mental states inform predictions of their upcoming behaviour and guide action perception.

Communication through teaching: How expert pianists and novice students interact
through sound
Atsuko Tominaga – Central European University
In my talk, I will discuss how expert pianists produce and adapt teaching signals through their performances and how novice students detect such cues by listening to teachers’ performances.

Others’ social contexts guide our predictions of their actions
Dr Shaheed Azaad – Postdoctoral Researcher, Central European University
Recent work on action prediction has shown that contextual, non-kinematic, cues can inform our predictions of others’ actions. In this series of experiments, we show that others’ social contexts similarly guide action prediction.