Is there a link this manuscript, please? :)

Work with 5/6 of my awesome supervisory team ☀️ @jendavies.bsky.social, @drgbuckingham.bsky.social, Chris Chambers, Ezio Preatoni, and Janet Bultitude.

Thanks to gw4biomeddtp.bsky.social and psychologybath.bsky.social

We hypothesise that the changes in motor system engagement during action observation associated with imagery vividness ('aphantasia') may reflect the extent to which the motor system participates in generating predictions about the observed action, not a necessary mechanism for action understanding.

We found that neither motor nor general visual imagery vividness predicted action understanding, Bayesian analyses provided moderate to strong evidence for the null hypothesis, and the results were stable across multiple robustness checks/ sensitivity analyses.

We examined the relationship between this measure and self-reported vividness of visual and motor imagery in an online sample of 392 participants.

We developed a measure of action understanding, in which participants judged the weight of objects from observing a hand lifting them. Action understanding was indexed by the slope of the relationship between the change in the objects’ actual weights and participants’ precipitation of the weights.

The question was motivated by past research linking action observation and imagery,e.g., evidence for overlapping neural representation, and by recent work (Dupont et al., 2024), finding an association between imagery vividness and motor system engagement during passive observation of hand actions.

@gw4biomeddtp.bsky.social @psychologybath.bsky.social @drgbuckingham.bsky.social @jendavies.bsky.social

Thank you for the update, it's pretty! Would it be possible to do something about the loading times?

Thanks :))

A huge thank you to @mmarneweck.bsky.social for hosting me and to @gw4biomeddtp.bsky.social for making this opportunity possible.

I previously got responses (and eventually found a wonderful mathematician collaborator) to a similar query from the HUB of Quantitative Modelling in Exeter
www.exeter.ac.uk/research/qua...