Research with young children has shown that, like adults, they focus selectively on the aspects of an actor’s behavior that are relevant to his or her underlying intentions. The current studies used the visual habituation paradigm to ask whether infants would similarly attend to those aspects of an action that are related to the actor’s goals. Infants saw an actor reach for and grasp one of two...

It has been proposed that actions are intrinsically linked to perception and that imagining, observing, preparing, or in any way representing an action excites the motor programs used to execute that same action. There is neurophysiological evidence that certain brain regions involved in executing actions are activated by the mere observation of action (the so-called "mirror system;" ). However...

The research study was designed to compare the safety and efficacy of the regimen of 5-flurouracil with cisplatin of investigational arm with the reference regimen of gemcitabine with cisplatin for the treatment of gallbladder cancer. A total of 60 patients were enrolled in the study. Out of 30 patients enrolled in arm-A (Gemcitabine with Cisplatin) and 30 patients enrolled in arm-B (5-Fluroura...

When and in what ways do infants recognize humans as intentional actors? An important aspect of this larger question concerns when infants recognize specific human actions (e.g. a reach) as object-directed (i.e. as acting toward goal-objects). In two studies using a visual habituation technique, 12-month-old infants were tested to assess their recognition that an adult's reach is directed towar...

introduction: anxiety is among the most common and treatable mental disorders. adrenergic and cannabinoid systems have an important role in the neurobiology of anxiety. the elevated plus-maze (epm) has broadly been used to investigate anxiolytic and anxiogenic compounds. the present study investigated the effects of intraperitoneal (ip) injection of cannabinoid cb1 receptor antagonist (am251) i...

It has been well established that people respond faster when they perform an action that is congruent with an observed action than when they respond with an incongruent action. Here we propose a new method of using interactive Virtual Characters (VCs) to test if social congruency effects can be obtained in a richer social context with sequential hand-arm actions. Two separate experiments were c...

We present a novel computational model that describes action perception as an active inferential process that combines motor prediction (the reuse of our own motor system to predict perceived movements) and hypothesis testing (the use of eye movements to disambiguate amongst hypotheses). The system uses a generative model of how (arm and hand) actions are performed to generate hypothesis-specif...