Bosbach and her colleagues confronted the patients with short video films in which people are asked to lift boxes. Each box was a different weight. Both patients were given the task, in the first part, of guessing the weight of the box that the person in the film was lifting. The patients received no other clues; they had to guess the weight of the box solely from the motion sequence of the lifter. It turned out that the patients were able to complete the task as correctly and unerringly as the control subjects. Apparently they were able solve the problem using their knowledge that, for example, a slow body movement signifies a heavy load and a faster movement, which gives the impression the subject was unloading something, suggests a lower weight.
In the second part of the task, the patients also saw videos of people who were lifting boxes. However, this time, in some cases, the people in the film were deceived about the actual weight of the boxes. So the actor, for example, received the information before lifting the box that he was lifting 18 kilograms - when indeed the box weighed only three. The patients then had to state whether the person in the video had the right or the wrong expectation regarding the weight of the box. Again, the only source of information for the patients to make their judgment was body movement. If the people in the film were deceived about the weight of the box, they tended to show a characteristic discrepancy in the movement, between the phases in which they prepared themselves to lift the box (expecting a heavy one) and the phase in which they were a
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Contact: Dr. Simone Bosbach
bosbach@cbs.mpg.de
44-20-76-79-11-54
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
5-Oct-2005