A Naturalistic Setup for Presenting Real People and Live Actions in Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience Studies

Tuğçe Nur Pekçetin; Şeyda Evsen; Serkan Pekçetin; Cengiz Acarturk; Burcu A. Urgen

doi:10.3791/65436

Method Article

A Naturalistic Setup for Presenting Real People and Live Actions in Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience Studies

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DOI:

10.3791/65436

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August 4th, 2023

Tuğçe Nur Pekçetin¹ , Şeyda Evsen² , Serkan Pekçetin³ , Cengiz Acarturk⁴ , Burcu A. Urgen⁵

¹Department of Cognitive Science, Middle East Technical University, ²Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Graduate Program, Bilkent University, ³Department of Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University, ⁴Department of Cognitive Science, Jagiellonian University, ⁵Department of Psychology, Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Graduate Program, National Magnetic Resonance Research Center (UMRAM), Aysel Sabuncu Brain Research Center, Bilkent University

Summary

This study presents a naturalistic experimental setup that allows researchers to present real-time action stimuli, obtain response time and mouse tracking data while participants respond after each stimulus display, and change actors between experimental conditions with a unique system including a special transparent organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screen and light manipulation.

Abstract

Perception of others' actions is crucial for survival, interaction, and communication. Despite decades of cognitive neuroscience research dedicated to understanding the perception of actions, we are still far away from developing a neurally inspired computer vision system that approaches human action perception. A major challenge is that actions in the real world consist of temporally unfolding events in space that happen "here and now" and are actable. In contrast, visual perception and cognitive neuroscience research to date have largely studied action perception through 2D displays (e.g., images or videos) that lack the presence of actors in space and time, hence these displays are limited in affording actability. Despite the growing body of knowledge in the field, these challenges must be overcome for a better understanding of the fundamental mechanisms of the perception of others' actions in the real world. The aim of this study is to introduce a novel setup to conduct naturalistic laboratory experiments with live actors in scenarios that approximate real-world settings. The core element of the setup used in this study is a transparent organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screen through which participants can watch the live actions of a physically present actor while the timing of their presentation is precisely controlled. In this work, this setup was tested in a behavioral experiment. We believe that the setup will help researchers reveal fundamental and previously inaccessible cognitive and neural mechanisms of action perception and will be a foundation for future studies investigating social perception and cognition in naturalistic settings.

Introduction

A fundamental skill for survival and social interaction is the ability to perceive and make sense of others' actions and interact with them in the surrounding environment. Previous research in the last several decades has made significant contributions to understanding the fundamental principles of how individuals perceive and understand others' actions¹^,²^,³^,⁴^,⁵^,⁶^,⁷^,⁸^,