Bridgette Hard

• Stanford University

Once one sees a pattern, it is challenging to “unsee” it; discovering structure alters processing. Precisely what changes as this happens is unclear, however. We probed this question by tracking changes in attention as viewers discovered statistical patterns within unfolding event sequences. We measured viewers’ “dwell times” (e.g., Hard, Recchia,...

How do people understand the everyday, yet intricate, behaviors that unfold around them? In the present research, we explored this by presenting viewers with self-paced slideshows of everyday activities and recording looking times, subjective segmentation (breakpoints) into action units, and slide-to-slide physical change. A detailed comparison of...

The current study addressed the degree to which maternal speech and action are synchronous in interactions with infants. English-speaking mothers demonstrated the function of two toys, stacking rings and nesting cups to younger infants (6-9.5 months) and older infants (9.5-13 months). Action and speech units were identified, and speech units were c...

People, in common with other creatures, need to identify recurrences in the world in order to thrive. Recurrences, whether in space or time, provide the stability and predictability that enable both understanding of the past and effective action in the future. Recurrences are often collected into categories and, in humans, named. One crucial catego...

Although people can take spatial perspectives different from their own, it is widely assumed that egocentric perspectives are natural and have primacy. Two studies asked respondents to describe the spatial relations between two objects on a table in photographed scenes; in some versions, a person sitting behind the objects was either looking at or...

Lozano, S. C., Hard, B. M., & Tversky, B. (2007). Putting action in perspective. Cognition, 103, 480-490. Lozano, S. C., Hard, B. M., & Tversky, B. (2008). Putting motor resonance in perspective. Cognition, 106, 1195-1220. All authors retract these two articles. Bridgette Martin Hard and Barbara Tversky believe that the research results cannot be r...

Reports a retraction of "Hierarchical encoding of behavior: Translating perception into action" by Bridgette Martin Hard, Sandra C. Lozano and Barbara Tversky (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2006[Nov], Vol 135[4], 588-608). All authors retract this article. Co-author Tversky and co-author Hard believe that the research results cannot...

Reports a retraction of "Perspective taking promotes action understanding and learning" by Sandra C. Lozano, Bridgette Martin Hard and Barbara Tversky (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2006[Dec], Vol 32[6], 1405-1421). All authors retract this article. Co-author Tversky and co-author Hard believe that the resear...

One way to regard the body is as a moving set of sensors, continuously capturing light, sound, smell, touch, heat, and more from the surround-ing world. Yet more sensors are inside the body, capturing informa-tion from the body's own movements and processes. Comprehending everyday action and experience requires integrating that information and maki...

Perceiving another person’s actions changes the spatial perspective people use to describe objects in a scene, possibly because seeing human action induces people to map the actions, including their spatial context, to their own body and motor representations [Lozano, S. C., Hard, B. M., & Tversky, B. (2007). Putting action in perspective. Cognitio...

One way to regard the body is as a moving set of sensors, continuously capturing light, sound, smell, touch, heat, and more from the surrounding world. Yet more sensors are inside the body, capturing information from the body's own movements and processes. Comprehending everyday action and experience requires integrating that information and making...

Embodied approaches to cognition propose that our own actions influence our understanding of the world. Do other people's actions also have this influence? The present studies show that perceiving another person's actions changes the way people think about objects in a scene. In Study 1, participants viewed a photograph and answered a question abou...

People often learn actions by watching others. The authors propose and test the hypothesis that perspective taking promotes encoding a hierarchical representation of an actor's goals and subgoals—a key process for observational learning. Observers segmented videos of an object assembly task into coarse and fine action units. They described what hap...

People encode goal-directed behaviors, such as assembling an object, by segmenting them into discrete actions, organized as goal–subgoal hierarchies. Does hierarchical encoding contribute to observational learning? Participants in 3 experiments segmented an object assembly task into coarse and fine units of action and later performed it themselves....

Everyday events, such as making a bed, can be segmented hierarchically, with the coarse level characterized by changes in the actor's goals and the fine level by subgoals (Zacks, Tversky, & Iyer, 2001). Does hierarchical event perception depend on knowledge of actors' intentions? This question was addressed by asking participants to segment films o...

Many everyday actions are learned by observing others perform them. Here, we investigate an account of how the mental representations elicited by observation are transformed into action plans and how that translation can be augmented. Neuropsychological evidence suggests that the motor system is naturally aroused by observing action, implicitly map...

According to the hierarchical encoding hypothesis, people segment observed behavior into units of action that are integrated into larger units across time. Study 1 tested this hypothesis by adapting techniques from studies of reading: participants watched a self-paced slideshow of an activity. Participants looked longer at slides corresponding to b...