Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

During object manipulation the actor’s eye movements are directed to the target of the interaction and to the relevantsites where this takes place. Eye movements during grasping observation are influenced by low-level motor information, help-ing inferring the target from hand shape. In an eye-tracking experiment, we investigated which factors influence understandingwhen observing bimanual object interactions, if no objects are visible but only the movements reproduced by an avatar. Par-ticipants watched ten different actions (e.g., pour water from a bottle into a cup) and guessed among ten possibilities. Alsoperspective was varied (frontal, side, head-centered). Preliminary results show higher response accuracy in the frontal perspec-tive. During the interaction phase participants spent more time fixating closer to the interaction point between the hands, wherethe objects would be, than on the single hands, suggesting this is the best vantage point to make sense of the observed actionwithout other cues.