UCLA

My dissertation aims to reveal the visuomotor mechanisms that underlie action processing of the self and others. The dissertation will shed light on domain-general computations underlying actions across the identity of others, as well as those unique to one’s own action. As methods, I will incorporate behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational techniques. I will further incorporate different types of stimuli ranging from visually impoverished point-light displays of the human body to contextually rich video stimuli. Chapter 1 examines at the behavioral level, how recognition of our own actions is affected by factors beyond visual properties, related to motoric and intrinsic participant variability. Chapter 2 extends the behavioral work to brain imaging, and further measures similarities and differences in neural activity for actions of the self and others. Chapter 3 shifts from the self to the actions of others involved in a range of social interactions. This chapter will systematize the degree of social context using methods adopted from computer vision and measure the representational space of motor and social features contributing to judgements of incongruency in the interaction.