The influence of context on the visual recognition of social actions

Actions do not occur out of the blue. Rather, they are often a part of human interactions and are, therefore, embedded in an action sequence. Previous research on visual action recognition has primarily focused on elucidating the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms in the recognition of individual actions. Surprisingly, the social and temporal context, in which actions are embedded, has received little attention. I will present studies examining the importance of context on action recognition. Specifically, we examined the influence of social context (i.e. competitive vs. cooperative interaction settings) on the observation of actions during real life interactions and found that social context modulates action observation. Moreover, we investigated the perceptual and temporal factors (i.e. action context as provided by visual information about preceding actions) on action recognition using an adaptation paradigm. Our results provide evidence that experimental effects are modulated by temporal context. These results in the way that action recognition is not guided by the immediate visual information but also by temporal and social contexts