How do we recognize and interpret what others are doing—whether they’re greeting a friend, preparing a meal together or doing sports? A new study authored by André Bockes, Ph.D. student at the Chair of Cognitive Neuroscience, and Prof. Angelika Lingnau, in collaboration with Prof. Martin Hebart, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, has tackled this question by creating a model of how humans perceive and categorize actions.
Using a carefully selected set of 768 short video clips depicting 256 types of human actions, more than 6,000 participants rated how similar these actions seemed to them. Based on these ratings, the researchers built a multidimensional model showing how different activities are related in our minds. Their study is published in the journal Communications Psychology.
Their analysis uncovered 28 meaningful dimensions—such as social interaction, handcraft, or the presence of several people in a scene—that capture the essential ways in which we perceive and categorize human actions. This framework offers new insights into how our brains organize the rich variety of actions we observe every day and paves the way for future behavioral and neuroimaging research on perception, communication, and social understanding.
“The dimensions we have determined in this study allow us to quantify the similarity between different actions. This enables us to make precise predictions for future studies in which we will investigate the behavior and neural responses of participants when presented with different actions,” says Prof. Lingnau.
More information:
André Bockes et al, Revealing Key Dimensions Underlying the Recognition of Dynamic Human Actions, Communications Psychology (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s44271-025-00338-y
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