The role of attention in anticipated action effects.

Past research has shown that merely anticipating a certain action in someone else leads observers to engage in the anticipated action-a phenomenon called anticipated action. In a standard experiment on anticipated action, participants watch video clips of a model engaging in triggering events such as nose wrinkling or hair falling. A typical finding is that participants engage in more nose actions while watching the nose wrinkling video than while watching the hair falling video and vice versa for the engagement in hair actions. Whereas past research has suggested that this effect is due to inferring a desire in others to act, an alternative explanation is that observing a triggering event in someone else guides attention toward respective body parts, facilitating any action toward this body part. In two experiments we set this explanation to a critical test. The results speak against attention as driving process and in favor of inferring a desire in others to act, because guiding attention to the location of the triggering event did not result in anticipated action effects. This result has important implications for research on anticipative processes and imitative behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The OXTR gene, implicit learning and social processing: Does empathy evolve from perceptual skills for details?

Oxytocin is an important messenger in the brain that has been linked to a variety of social functions in pharmacological studies. Besides, functional genetic variations on the oxytocin receptor gene have been repeatedly associated with social processing and functioning. Despite this knowledge, there are very few studies investigating the mechanisms that may explain the link between oxytocin and social functions. In the endeavor to fill this gap in the literature, the current study searches for associations between the prominent rs2268498 polymorphism on the oxytocin receptor gene and participants' ability to perceive and store implicit social information, which is a fundamental function in social information processing. N=121 healthy participants were experimentally tested with an implicit learning paradigm, answered questionnaires assessing empathy and autistic traits, and were genotyped for the rs2268498 polymorphism. T-allele carriers (TT and TC genotypes) exhibited significantly better implicit learning performance than carriers of the CC-genotype, and learning performance was positively associated with self-reported empathy and negatively with self-reported autistic traits. Results indicate that differences in implicit perception and storing of environmental details while watching social interactions could be an important mechanism to explain the association between differences in endogenous oxytocin activity and social functioning.