Does that look heavy to you? Perceived weight judgment in lifting actions in younger and older adults

Abstract

When interpreting other people's movements or actions, observers may not only rely on the visual cues available in the observed movement, but they may also be able to “put themselves in the other person's shoes” by engaging brain systems involved in both “mentalizing” and motor simulation. The ageing process brings changes in both perceptual and motor abilities, yet little is known about how these changes may affect the ability to accurately interpret other people's actions. Here we investigated the effect of ageing on the ability to discriminate the weight of objects based on the movements of actors lifting these objects. Stimuli consisted of videos of an actor lifting a small box weighing 0.05–0.9 kg or a large box weighting 3–18 kg. In a four-alternative forced-choice task, younger and older participants reported the perceived weight of the box in each video. Overall, older participants were less sensitive than younger participants in discriminating the perceived weight of lifted boxes, an effect that was especially pronounced in the small box condition. Weight discrimination performance was better for the large box compared to the small box in both groups, due to greater saliency of the visual cues in this condition. These results suggest that older adults may require more salient visual cues to interpret the actions of others accurately. We discuss the potential contribution of age-related changes in visual and motor function on the observed effects and suggest that older adults' decline in the sensitivity to subtle visual cues may lead to greater reliance on visual analysis of the observed scene and its semantic context.

Are Older Adults Less Embodied? A Review of Age Effects through the Lens of Embodied Cognition

“…Aging decreases the efficiency in learning and then executing novel motor sequences ( Coats et al, 2013 ) with specific losses for action observation ( Maryott and Sekuler, 2009 ). For instance, Maguinness et al (2013) explored age-related differences in a task in which participants viewed videos of either a hand or a full body lifting weighted boxes and had to indicate the amount of weight being lifted. Older adults were overall less sensitive for weight prediction than young adults, but particularly so when there were fewer visual details on the biomechanics of the lift.…”

Perceiving what you intend to do from what you do: evidence for embodiment in social interactions

“…Previous laboratory studies have shown that humans are very sensitive to kinematics variations of biological movements and are able to accurately – though often implicitly – anticipate a lot of information from movement observations. An object’s weight for instance can be evaluated through movement kinematics of a partner manipulating a (non-visible) object (Maguinness, Setti, Roudaia, & Kenny, 2013 ; Meulenbroek, Bosga, Hulstijn, & Miedl, 2007 ; Runeson & Frykholm, 1983 ). It is also possible to detect the deceptive intentions of a person performing an object-related action or even to have an idea of what weight the actor expected the object to be (Runeson & Frykholm, 1983 ).…”

Embodied cognition of aging

“…Therefore, better physical health and enhanced dexterity should also facilitate and even enhance action/motor simulation in cognitive processing and reversely. For instance, healthy elderly are less accurate than younger adults in the estimation of perceived weight judgment (Maguinness et al, 2013 ). This effect of aging can be partly explained in terms of motor simulation, in other words as a function of the real or perceived motor-efficacy of elderly adults (see Potter et al, 2009 , for perceived efficacy).…”