Inferences through imagined actions: Knowing by simulated doing.

Abstract

People make simple physical inferences by acting on objects. They might, for example, tilt a container to determine its chances of spilling. Five experiments examined whether people can also draw physical inferences by taking simulated actions. The basic experimental task involved 2 glasses of different widths but equal heights. People imagined that the glasses were filled to the same level with water and answered whether they would spill at the same or different angles. When asked explicitly, people were usually wrong; but, when they closed their eyes and tilted each glass until the imagined water reached the rim, they correctly tilted a narrow glass farther than a wide one. These experiments dissociated simulated actions from both propositional inferences and visual imagery. The results suggest a new emphasis on the role of motor activity in drawing inferences and address issues related to joining naive intuitions and explicit understandings.

Tool use and the effect of action on the imagination.

“…The significance of mental models for the current story is not their potential for mechanical understanding. Once invoked, it is conceivable that an overleamed model becomes little more than an implicit transformation matrix that converts action into imagery updates, inaccessible to conceptual or visual analysis (Schwartz & Black, 1999). What is significant here is the ability of models to dynamically reformulate the coupling between action and imagination depending on which model people bring to mind.…”

“…For the peg task, participants have to attend to changes within their image to know when to stop (when the two pegs align). This differs from many imagery tasks in which the target indicates the angle of rotation or the angle is prespecified using an external frame of reference (e.g., turn the block 90°; see Schwartz & Black, 1999). For these latter classes of problems, it is not necessary to complete the rotation in fine gradations (e.g., Just & Carpenter, 1985), and participants often report their image "jumps" in gross and piecemeal movements.…”

“…If the spatial properties of an action are insufficient to explain the effect of action on imagery, then it is useful to propose an alternative mechanism. Although we do not defend the proposal experimentally here, we argue elsewhere that people have timingresponsive representations (TRs; Schwartz, 1999;Schwartz & Berry, 2000, Schwartz & Black, 1999. As people operate in their environment, their actions generate timing signals indicative of change.…”

“…For example, people can draw some inferences through action that they cannot make through reflection, presumably because the action drives their representations (Krist, Fieberg, & Wilkening, 1993). Schwartz and Black (1999) found that people are quite bad at determining whether a wide glass and a thin glass will pour at the same angle if filled to the same level of water. Yet, when given an opportunity to tilt empty glasses without vision and while imagining the behavior of the water, they correctly tilt a thin glass farther than a wide one.…”

Mental imaging of motor activity in humans

“…Another form of implicit mental operation has been recently added to the realm of motor imagery -this is the cognitive process related to recognising and understanding actions observed from other individuals. It has often been suggested that an action can only be understood to the extent that it can be performed by the observer [10,11] -the general idea of 'knowing by simulated doing' [12]. Thus, observing an action would activate within the observer the same mechanisms that would be activated were that action intended or imagined by the observer.…”