An information-based approach to action understanding

It has been proposed that the ability to make sense of other agents' behavior relies on the activation of internal mechanisms that map action perception onto action execution. In this study we explored the constraints on this ability introduced by eyeheight-scaled information in the optic array. Short and tall participants provided maximum overhead reaching judgments for themselves and another participant. Perceptual information was manipulated by changing the participants' optically specified eyeheight. Observers were modestly accurate in perceiving maximum overhead reach for themselves and for another actor whose action capabilities differed. Perceived maximum overhead reach increased for both self- and other-judgments when the perceiver's eyeheight was increased. The results suggest an important role of perceptual information that has gone unrecognized in existing accounts of action understanding and prediction.     

Is there really a dissociative taxon on the dissociative experiences scale?

The Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES; Bernstein & Putnam, 1986) and MMPI (Hathaway & McKinley, 1940) were administered to 1,237 college students to evaluate MMPI differences for nonpathological (n = 90) or pathological dissociators (n = 111) and nondissociative controls (n = 476). MMPIs of both dissociation groups had multiple clinical elevations with a mean 8-9 code. People classified in the pathological dissociation group had MMPI scores remarkably similar to those in the normal dissociation group. The DES and DES-Taxon (DES-T; Waller, Putnam, & Carlson, 1996) were also highly correlated. Our findings strongly suggest the DES-T does not uniquely identify categorical dissociation.