Previous work has revealed that social cues, such as gaze and pointed fingers, can lead to a shift in the focus of another person's attention. Research investigating the mechanisms of these shifts of attention has typically employed detection or localization button pressing tasks. Because indepth analyses of the spatio-temporal characteristics of aiming movements can provide additional insights into the dynamics of the processing of stimuli, the current study used a reaching paradigm to further explore the processing of social cues. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants aimed to a left or right location after a non-predictive eye gaze cue towards one of the target locations. Seven stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) between 100 and 2400 ms were used. Both temporal (reaction time-RT) and spatial (initial movement angle-IMA) characteristics of the movements were analysed. RTs were shorter for cued (gazed-at) targets than to uncued targets across most SOAs. There were, however, no statistical differences in IMA between movements to cued and uncued targets suggesting action planning was not affected by the gaze cue. In Experiment 3, the social cue was a finger pointing to one of the two target locations. Finger pointing cues generated significant cuing effects in both RT and IMA. Overall, these results indicate that eye gaze and finger pointing social cues are processed differently. Perception-action coupling (i.e., a tight link between the response and the social cue that is presented) may play a role in the generation of action, and deviation of trajectories towards cued and uncued targets.

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Past research has shown that the movement times of imagined aiming movements were more similar to actual movement times after the individual has experienced executing the movements. The purpose of the present study was to determine if experience with a set of movements altered the imagination of movements that were not experienced. Participants imagined a series of reciprocal aiming movements in different movement difficulty contexts (created by altering target width and movement amplitude) before and after actually executing a series of aiming movements. The range of difficulties of the imagined movements included difficulty contexts that were within (Experiment 1) or outside (Experiment 2) the range of difficulty experienced during execution. It was found that imagined movement times of movements within the range of movement difficulties experienced were more consistent with Fitts’ Law after movement experience, whereas imagination of more difficult movements was not altered by experience. It is suggested that execution did not enhance imagination of more difficult movements because the relative contributions of motor planning and control to the more difficult movements were different from those in the experienced movements. Thus, the enhancement of imagination through experience might only occur when mechanisms underlying the executed and imagined movements are similar.