Fleeing or not: Responsivity of a chased target influences the cognitive representation of the chasing action

The chasing action, in which an actor chases a target, is a fundamental activity for the evolutionary shaping of social abilities. Where previous research has emphasized the chaser's role, the current study explored whether the fleeing responsivity of a chased target influences the cognitive representation of the chasing action. We investigated this with a change-detection task, in which a set of chasing actions, either exhibiting or not exhibiting fleeing behavior, were memorized in sequence, and it was tested whether a memorized action reappeared after altering an object's appearance. The results suggest that the target's fleeing responsivity influenced the detection of representation-related changes in the appearance of the involved agents, especially when the appearance of one target was replaced with another (i.e., a new pair, but with the same functional role), showing impaired sensitivity to change for the chasing action (Experiment 1). This effect disappeared, however, when the perceived chasing from presented movements was impaired, while displaying largely the same low-level differences as those present in earlier trials through the use of mirrored chasing (Experiment 2) and setting the faced direction opposite of the moving direction (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that the fleeing responsivity of the chased target can influence the stored representation of the action. This differentiation may be attributed to the stronger construction of social interaction structure for chasing action with fleeing than without, since the fleeing behavior can be deemed a contingency cue for social interaction interpretation.