2.3.2. Results

Contrasting the overall performance between experiments revealed no significant differences, showing that overall participants performed at comparable levels across the four experiments. Comparing the bias effect between experiments revealed significant effects of both the scope and the target of the intention. The bias effect was indeed significantly increased for the superordinate intention compared with the motor intention (F(1,116)=8.36, p<.005, ή = .81) and for the social intention compared with the non-social intention (F(1,116)=5.06, p=.02, ή = .61). Furthermore, these differences were observed for different amounts of information according to the dimension itself. Indeed, along the scope dimension, the bias had a significantly greater effect when inferring a superordinate intention than a motor one in the conditions with a moderate amount of visual information (post-hoc Fisher test, p = .014). Along the target dimension, on the other hand, the only significant difference was observed for a high amount of visual information with a greater bias effect for inferring social intentions than non-social ones (post-hoc Fisher test, p = .0035) (see figure 8).

Fig. 8. Mean score (± SD) of the bias effect expressed as a percentage of correct responses for each type of intention. Left panel: comparison between intentions with same target but different scopes (MOTOR vs. SUPERORD.). Right panel: comparison between intentions with same scope but different targets (NON-SOCIAL vs. SOCIAL).