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

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.

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.

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' actions^{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,}

The experimental protocols in this study were approved by the Ethics Committee for Research with Human Participants of Bilkent University. All participants included in the study were over 18 years old, and they read and signed the informed consent form before starting the study.

1. General design steps

NOTE: Figure 1A (top view) and Figure 1B and Figure 1C (front.......

Response time (RT) comparisons
The current study is an ongoing project, so, as representative results, data from the main part of the experiment (Experiment Part 3) are presented. These data are from 40 participants, including 23 females and 17 males, with ages ranging from 18-28 years (M = 22.75, SD = 3.12).

Investigating the extent of the normality of the distribution of the dependent variables was necessary in order to choose the appropriate statisti.......

The overarching goal of the present study is to contribute to our understanding of how human high-level visual perception and cognition work in real-life situations. This study focused on action perception and suggested a naturalistic yet controllable experimental paradigm that enables researchers to test how individuals perceive and evaluate others' actions by presenting real actors in a laboratory setting.

The significance of this proposed methodology compared to existing methodologies i.......

This work was supported by grants to Burcu A. Urgen from The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (Project number: 120K913) and Bilkent University. We thank our pilot participant Sena Er Elmas for bringing the idea of adding background noise between the actor changes, Süleyman Akı for setting up the light circuit, and Tuvana Karaduman for the idea of using a security camera backstage and her contribution as one of the actors in the study.