Audience-contingent variation in action demonstrations for humans and computers
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Updated: Jun 1, 2026

A Naturalistic Setup for Presenting Real People and Live Actions in Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience Studies
Published on: August 4, 2023
Jonathan S Herberg1, Megan M Saylor, Palis Ratanaswasd
1Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University.
Abstract:
People may exhibit two kinds of modifications when demonstrating action for others: modifications to facilitate bottom-up, or sensory-based processing; and modifications to facilitate top-down, or knowledge-based processing. The current study examined actors' production of such modifications in action demonstrations for audiences that differed in their capacity for intentional reasoning. Actors' demonstrations of complex actions for a non-anthropomorphic computer system and for people (adult and toddler) were compared. Evidence was found for greater highlighting of top-down modifications in the demonstrations for the human audiences versus the computer audience. Conversely, participants highlighted simple perceptual modifications for the computer audience, producing more punctuated and wider ranging motions. This study suggests that people consider differences in their audiences when demonstrating action.
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