Observing Expertise-Related Actions Leads to Perfect Time Flow Estimations

Abstract

The estimation of the time of exposure of a picture portraying an action increases as a function of the amount of movement implied in the action represented. This effect suggests that the perceiver creates an internal embodiment of the action observed as if internally simulating the entire movement sequence. Little is known however about the timing accuracy of these internal action simulations, specifically whether they are affected by the level of familiarity and experience that the observer has of the action. In this study we asked professional pianists to reproduce different durations of exposure (shorter or longer than one second) of visual displays both specific (a hand in piano-playing action) and non-specific to their domain of expertise (a hand in finger-thumb opposition and scrambled-pixels) and compared their performance with non-pianists. Pianists outperformed non-pianists independently of the time of exposure of the stimuli; remarkably the group difference was particularly magnified by the pianists’ enhanced accuracy and stability only when observing the hand in the act of playing the piano. These results for the first time provide evidence that through musical training, pianists create a selective and self-determined dynamic internal representation of an observed movement that allows them to estimate precisely its temporal duration.

What are you doing? How active and observational experience shape infants' action understanding

“…Probably owing to enhanced simulation of the observed kinematic acts ([67-70]; cf. [71]), observers are better at predicting the outcome of actions [72] and at estimating the duration [73] of motorically familiar actions when they watch them performed by others. Moreover, experienced adults tend to outperform novices when asked to recognize, categorize and recall observed actions [74][75][76][77].…”

How long did it last? You would better ask a human

“…Expertise leads to a fine tuning of timing abilities. Professional pianists asked to reproduce the duration of visual displays outperform non-pianists when observing a specific action (a piano-playing hand), but not when observing non-specific actions (finger-thumb opposition; Chen et al, 2013 ). This indicates that musical expertise involves a selective dynamic internal representation that allows to estimate precisely the temporal duration of observed movements related to the expert performance.…”

Peer Review #2 of "Sports experts’ unique perception of time duration based on the processing principle of an integrated model of timing (v0.1)"

“…The power calculations for these effects were based on the F-test (repeated-measures ANOVA); the α value was set at 0.05, the statistical power (1-β) was set at 0.8, the correlation among repeated measures was set at 0.5, and the nonsphericity correction was set at 1. The effect size f for the effects that have previously been explored was determined according to previous studies (Chen & Cesari 2015;Chen et al 2013), and a small effect size was assumed based on Cohen's approaches for unexplored effects (Cohen 1988). Moreover, due to considerations of publication bias and a tendency to overestimate effect size in underpowered studies (Schafer & Schwarz 2019;Schweizer & Furley 2016), the effect size in our power analysis was half the magnitude of the original effects based on the findings from Open Science Collaboration (Open Science 2015).…”

“…However, this prediction has not yet been tested. Moreover, although some studies have suggested that sports experts have more precise and stable duration perception than nonathletes (Chen & Cesari 2015;Chen et al 2013;Chen et al 2014), whether sports experts perceive a longer duration than others for expertise-related stimuli remains unclear.…”