Motor {bpnreg}R Documentation

Phase differences in hand flexion-extension movements.

Description

A dataset from a study by Puglisi et.al. (2017) on the role of attention in human motor resonance.

Usage

Motor

Format

A data frame with 42 rows and 4 variables:

Cond

a factor variable indicating the condition a participant was placed in; 1 = 'explicit', 2 = 'semi.implicit' or 3 = 'implicit'

PhaseDiff

a numeric variable the phase difference between 'observer' and 'mover' in degrees

AvAmp

a numeric variable indicating the average amplitude of the hand movement of the 'observer'

Phaserad

a numeric variable the phase difference between 'observer' and 'mover' in radians

Details

In their research Puglisi et.al. (2017) conduct a between subjects experiment in which ‘observers’ in multiple degrees of explicitness are asked to look at the movement of a hand of the ‘mover’ or other object in order to evaluate the role of attention in motor resonant response.

The experiment has four conditions:

1. The ‘explicit observation’ condition (n = 14), where observers are explicitly instructed to observe the hand.

2. The ‘semi-implicit observation’ condition (n = 14) where the observers have to do a task that requires implicit observation of the hand.

3. The ‘implicit observation’ condition (n = 14), where observers have to do a task that is independent of the observation of the hand that is moving in front of them.

4. A baseline condition (n=14) where there is no moving hand but observers have to look at an inanimate object that moves in an identical manner to the hand.

The idea of motor resonance is then that the ‘observer’, because they are looking explicitly or implicitly at the hand of the ‘mover’, starts moving his or her hand in the same manner. This is the resonant response. In each condition the hand movements of the observers were measured and the phase difference between the observers' hand and the hand they observed (the movers' hand) was calculated. This was not done for the baseline condition because in this condition there was no periodic pattern of movement in the ‘observers’ hand.

The phase difference is a circular variable and can be described and analyzed using circular statistics.

Source

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0177457


[Package bpnreg version 2.0.3 Index]