ABSTRACT
Ideomotor movements may arise in observers (involuntarily or even countervoluntarily) while they watch goal-directed actions or events. We developed a paradigm that allows us to assess how the movements induced in observers are related to the actions or events inducing them. We found that ideomotor movements were governed by two principles: perceptual induction (i.e. people move in accordance with what they see) and intentional induction (i.e. people move in accordance with what they would like to see). We review a series of experiments in which observers watch the outcomes of their own preceding actions, of somebody else’s actions, or of actions generated by a computer. In our experiments, a complex pattern of action induction was observed in both hand and head movements. The results suggest that people tend to perform, in their own actions, what they see being performed in the actions they observe. Action induction can pertain to both the physical surface and the intentional subtext of the observed action. Though perceptual induction appears to be ubiquitous, it may become suspended for the sake of intentional action control.
