Body Movement Imitation and Perspective Perception Among Psychiatric Patients

Overview

The ability to understand the other's perspective and respond accordingly is the most important normal process of daily social life and is probably one of the foundations of human existence. This capability is reflected, inter alia, as an imitation - an important and effective form of learning which is very developed in humans. When we are required to imitate a particular movement, speed of response depends on the perspective of the movement. Imitative response is implemented faster when the movement is observed from first-person perspective, than if the motion is presented from the perspective of a third party. While healthy individuals don't find it difficult to imitate, or to understand the other's emotion expression, there are psychiatric populations (such as autism and schizophrenia) who find it difficult to demonstrate these capabilities (Park, Matthews et al. 2008). Beyond these capabilities impairment, schizophrenic patients have difficulty distinguishing between their arm movements and those of a foreign hand and find it difficult to leave the boundaries of egocentric interpretation of reality and adopt the other's point of view. These behavioral disorders arise from defects in the network of mirror neurons (Buccino and Amore 2008; Langdon, Coltheart et al. 2010). Therefore, the investigator expect that schizophrenic patients will not see a preference for movements that will be displayed in first-person perspective from the same movements that will be displayed from the perspective of a third party. Consequently, the investigator speculate that these subjects will not exhibit differences at imitating the response of which will be presented from different perspectives (Jackson, Meltzoff et (al. 2006.