Cooperation or competition? Discriminating between social intentions by observing prehensile movements

Body movement provides a rich source of information about other people’s goals and intentions. In the present study, we examined a particular aspect concerned with the interpretation of bodily movement — how well people can distinguish between different social intentions by observing a reach-to-grasp movement. To ascertain to what extent intention-from-motion judgements rely on visual kinematics, we compared prediction performance on a typical temporal-occlusion video task with prediction performance on a temporal-occlusion point-light task. In the video task, participants observed videos showing a model reaching towards and grasping a wooden block with different intents: to cooperate with a partner in building a tower, compete with an opponent to be the first to put the object in the middle of the working surface, or perform an individual action. In the point-light task, participants observed point-light displays of the same movements. Although predictions were more accurate for the video task, prediction performance was not disrupted for the point-light task, suggesting that essential kinematic information available in point-light displays was indeed suffcient for intention-from-motion judgement. Importantly, the same kinematic landmarks were used to discriminate between social intentions for the video and the point-light task. This suggests that observers not only have the ability to use kinematic information when no other information is available, but they use kinematic information to discriminate between intentions when watching the motion of others under full light conditions.