Noteworthy, this difference is present regardless of observers’ handedness, which is in contrast with the proposal that the correspondence between observed movements and stored representations could foster action recognition (see for a review). These results indicate an attentional/perceptual bias toward the right side of the human body and are also consistent with findings from research investigating the perception of sport actions, according to which the outcomes of right-limbed movements can be anticipated better than the outcomes of left-limbed movements. Similar findings were reported for dynamic stimuli representing ambiguous human bodies represented in the act of performing unimanual and unipedal movements. In recent studies, we found that when right- and left-handed subjects were required to indicate the orientation of ambiguous (in terms of front or back view) figures representing human silhouettes in the act of performing one-handed manual actions, both groups reported perceiving the figures more frequently as oriented consistently with a right-handed movement than with a left-handed movement. Therefore, as we already proposed, the implicit representation of others’ handedness seems to be affected more by visual than by motor processes during the perception of ambiguous human silhouettes. However, the hemifield of presentation showed a larger effect size on the perceived spinning direction than on the perceived limb laterality. Results indicated that the lateralized presentation of the stimuli affected both their perceived limb laterality (a larger number of figures being interpreted as right-limbed in the RVF than in the LVF) and their perceived spinning direction (a larger number of figures being interpreted as spinning clockwise in the LVF than in the RVF). To this aim, we required participants to indicate the perceived spinning direction (which also unveils the perceived handedness/footedness) of ambiguous stimuli depicting humans with an arm or a leg outstretched. Therefore, we investigated whether the lateralized presentation of an ambiguous rotating human body would affect its perceived handedness/footedness (implying a role of motor representations), its perceived spinning direction (implying a role of visual representations), or both. On the other hand, hemispheric-specific rotational biases, combined with the well-known bias to perceive forward-facing figures, could represent a confounding factor when accounting for such findings. Moreover, such a bias is stronger when static human silhouettes are presented in the RVF (right visual field) than in the LVF (left visual field), which might represent a particular instance of embodiment. Both static and dynamic ambiguous stimuli representing human bodies that perform unimanual or unipedal movements are usually interpreted as right-limbed rather than left-limbed, suggesting that human observers attend to the right side of others more than the left one.
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