Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent research reveals overlaps of perception and action-planning areas of the brain, both in the act of doing and the act ofobserving. The Theory of Event Coding (TEC) suggests we create action-effect contingencies when performing an action.However, this study was designed to assess whether these action-effect contingencies could be formed by participantssimply observing different levels of the action effect contingency. The experimenter performed a dot-control task, usingthe A and L keys (each keypress was paired with one of two tones). Participants watched the screen and listened to the toneseither with or without access to the actions of the experimenter, and afterwards took a compatibility test to assess responsetimes when presented compatible or incompatible action-effect pairings. Participants without access to the experimentersactions showed greater compatibility effects than participants with access, indicating action-effect contingencies can belearned simply through observation.