Eye movements during action preparation

Looking at actions of others activates representations of similar own actions, that is, the action resonates. This may facilitate or interfere with the actions that one intends to make. We asked whether people promote or block those effects by making eye movements to or away from the actions of others. We investigated gaze behavior with a cup-clinking task: An actor shown on a video grabbed a cup and moved it toward the participant who next grabbed his own cup in the 'same' or in a different, 'complementary', way. In the 'same' condition, participants mostly looked at the place where the actor held the cup. In the 'complementary' condition, gaze behavior was similar at the start of the actor's action. To our surprise, as the action reached completion, participants started to look at the cup's site that corresponded to the grabbing instruction for their own action. A second experiment showed that this effect grew with delay of the go-signal. This indicates that a reason for the effect may be to support memorizing the instructed action. The bottom line of the study is that passively viewed scenes (passive in the sense that nothing in the observed scene is manipulated by the viewer) are scanned to support preparation of actions that one intends to make. We discuss how this finding relates to action resonance and how it relates to links between representations of actions and objects.