Grasping social intentions from movement: from thought experiments to empirical evidence

Scepticism has been expressed concerning the possibility to understand others’ social intentions by simply observing their movements: Since there are always an infinite number of different intentions that may have produced any particular action, motor information might be sufficient to understand what an agent is doing, but it is not sufficient to understand her remote goal in performing that particular action. This talk will question this view on the basis of recent evidence regarding the extraction of intentions from movement observation. Based on these recent findings, we shall contend that i) different social intentions translate into differential kinematic patterns; ii) observers rely on differences in visual kinematics to anticipate the intention of an agent in performing a given movement; iii) incapability to exploit information from kinematic sources can lead to difficulties in understanding others’ intentions when no other cues (e.g. context information) are available.