What are you doing? Recent advances in visual action recognition research

The visual recognition of actions is critical for humans when interacting with their physical and social environment. The unraveling of the underlying processes has sparked wide interest in several fields including computational modeling, neuroscience, and psychology. Recent research endeavors on how people recognize actions provide important insights into the mechanisms underlying action recognition. Moreover, they give new ideas for man-machine interfaces and have implications for artificial intelligence. The aim of the symposium is to provide an integrative view on recent advances in our understanding of the psychological and neural processes underlying action recognition. Speakers will discuss new and related developments in the recognition of mainly object- and human-directed actions from a behavioral, neuroscientific, and modeling perspective. These developments include, among other things, a shift from the investigation of isolated actions to the examination of action recognition under more naturalistic conditions including contextual factors and the human ability to read social intentions from the recognized actions. These findings are complemented by neuroscientific work examining the action representation in motor cortex. Finally, a novel theory of goal-directed actions will be presented that integrates the results from various action recognition experiments. The symposium will first discuss behavioral and neuroscientific aspects of action recognition and then will shift its attention to the modeling of the processes underlying action recognition. More specifically, Nick Barraclough will present research on action recognition using adaptation paradigms and object-directed and locomotive actions. He will talk about the influence of the observer's mental state on action recognition using displays that present the action as naturalistic as possible. Cristina Becchio will talk about actions and their ability to convey social intentions. She will present research on the translation of social intentions into kinematic patterns of two interacting persons and discuss the observers' ability to visually use these kinematic cues for inferring social intentions. Stephan de la Rosa will focus on social actions and talk about the influence of social and temporal context on the recognition of social actions. Moreover, he will present research on the visual representation underlying the recognition of social interactions. Ehud Zohary will discuss the representation of actions within the motor pathway using fMRI and the sensitivity of the motor pathway to visual and motor aspects of an action. Martin Giese will wrap up the symposium by presenting a physiologically plausible neural theory for the perception of goal-directed hand actions and discuss this theory in the light of recent physiological findings. The symposium is targeted towards the general VSS audience and provides an comprehensive and integrative view about an essential ability of human visual functioning