Document Detail


Perception of animacy and direction from local biological motion signals.
MedLine Citation:
PMID:  18842074     Owner:  NLM     Status:  MEDLINE    
Abstract/OtherAbstract:
We present three experiments that investigated the perception of animacy and direction from local biological motion cues. Coherent and scrambled point-light displays of humans, cats, and pigeons that were upright or inverted were embedded in a random dot mask and presented to naive observers. Observers assessed the animacy of the walker on a six-point Likert scale in Experiment 1, discriminated the direction of walking in Experiment 2, and completed both the animacy rating and the direction discrimination tasks in Experiment 3. We show that like the ability to discriminate direction, the perception of animacy from scrambled displays that contain solely local cues is orientation specific and can be well-elicited within exposure times as short as 200 ms. We show further that animacy ratings attributed to our stimuli are linearly correlated with the ability to discriminate their direction of walking. We conclude that the mechanisms responsible for processing local biological motion signals not only retrieve locomotive direction but also aid in assessing the presence of animate agents in the visual environment.
Authors:
Dorita H F Chang; Nikolaus F Troje
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Publication Detail:
Type:  Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't     Date:  2008-05-07
Journal Detail:
Title:  Journal of vision     Volume:  8     ISSN:  1534-7362     ISO Abbreviation:  J Vis     Publication Date:  2008  
Date Detail:
Created Date:  2008-10-09     Completed Date:  2009-02-27     Revised Date:  -    
Medline Journal Info:
Nlm Unique ID:  101147197     Medline TA:  J Vis     Country:  United States    
Other Details:
Languages:  eng     Pagination:  3.1-10     Citation Subset:  IM    
Affiliation:
Centre for Neuroscience Studies, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada. 5dc16@queensu.ca
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MeSH Terms
Descriptor/Qualifier:
Adolescent
Discrimination (Psychology) / physiology*
Female
Form Perception / physiology*
Humans
Male
Motion Perception / physiology*
Movement*
Orientation / physiology
Photic Stimulation / methods
Young Adult

From MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine


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