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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jan 19, 2026

A Novel Experimental and Analytical Approach to the Multimodal Neural Decoding of Intent During Social Interaction in Freely-behaving Human Infants

A Novel Experimental and Analytical Approach to the Multimodal Neural Decoding of Intent During Social Interaction in Freely-behaving Human Infants

Published on: October 4, 2015

Seeing the Unexpected: How Brains Read Communicative Intent through Kinematics.

James P Trujillo^1,2, Irina Simanova¹, Asli Özyürek^2,3

¹Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour.

Cerebral Cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)

|September 11, 2019

Summary

Understanding social cues involves brain systems like the putative mirror neuron system (pMNS) and mentalizing system (MS). Communicative exaggeration in actions activates these systems, aiding social intention inference.

Keywords:

communication connectivity fMRI gesture intention

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Neurons as Communicators of the Brain

Neurons as Communicators of the Brain

Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Science
Social Cognition

Background:

Social interaction relies on recognizing subtle behavioral cues, including kinematic differences in actions.
The putative mirror neuron system (pMNS) and mentalizing system (MS) are implicated in understanding unusual actions.
Brain dynamics of pMNS and MS during exaggerated kinematics remain understudied.

Purpose of the Study:

Investigate brain activity and connectivity in pMNS and MS when viewing communicatively exaggerated gestures.
Determine if kinematic exaggeration influences social intention inference.
Explore the role of expectation violations in signaling communicative intent.

Main Methods:

Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with 28 participants.
Participants classified pantomime gestures (stick-light videos) as social or nonsocial.
Kinematic exaggeration and participant responses were used to model communicativeness probability.

Main Results:

Kinematic exaggeration modulated interregion connectivity and activation within pMNS and MS, task-dependently.
In the social task, increased gesture communicativeness enhanced pMNS and MS activation.
Top-down coupling from MS to pMNS was modulated by exaggeration in the social task; no engagement observed in the nonsocial task.

Conclusions:

Expectation violations serve as a crucial cue for inferring communicative intention.
Findings extend previous work on unexpected actions to more subtle social signaling.
pMNS and MS are dynamically engaged in processing subtle communicative exaggerations during social tasks.