Motor-based theories of facial expression recognition propose that the visual perception of facial expression is aided by sensorimotor processes that are also used for the production of the same expression. Accordingly, sensorimotor and visual processes should provide congruent emotional information about a facial expression. Here, we report evidence that challenges this view. Specifically, the repeated execution of facial expressions has the opposite effect on the recognition of a subsequent facial expression than the repeated viewing of facial expressions. Moreover, the findings of the motor condition, but not of the visual condition, were correlated with a nonsensory condition in which participants imagined an emotional situation. These results can be well accounted for by the idea that facial expression recognition is not always mediated by motor processes but can also be recognized on visual information alone.

Recognizing whether the gestures of somebody mean a greeting or a threat is crucial for social interactions. In real life, action recognition occurs over the entire visual field. In contrast, much of the previous research on action recognition has primarily focused on central vision. Here our goal is to examine what can be perceived about an action outside of foveal vision. Specifically, we probed the valence as well as first level and second level recognition of social actions (handshake, hugging, waving, punching, slapping, and kicking) at 0° (fovea/fixation), 15°, 30°, 45°, and 60° of eccentricity with dynamic (Experiment 1) and dynamic and static (Experiment 2) actions. To assess peripheral vision under conditions of good ecological validity, these actions were carried out by a life-size human stick figure on a large screen. In both experiments, recognition performance was surprisingly high (more than 66% correct) up to 30° of eccentricity for all recognition tasks and followed a nonlinear decline with increasing eccentricities.

Recognizing actions of others across the whole visual field is required for social interactions. In a previous study, we have shown that recognition is very good even when life-size avatars who were facing the observer carried out actions (e.g. waving) and were presented very far away from the fovea (Fademrecht, Bülthoff, & de la Rosa, 2016). We explored the possibility whether this remarkable performance was owed to life-size avatars facing the observer, which - according to some social cognitive theories (e.g. Schilbach et al., 2013) - could potentially activate different social perceptual processes as profile facing avatars. Participants therefore viewed a life-size stick figure avatar that carried out motion-captured social actions (greeting actions: handshake, hugging, waving; attacking actions: slapping, punching and kicking) in frontal and profile view. Participants' task was to identify the actions as 'greeting' or as 'attack' or to assess the emotional valence of the actions. While recognition accuracy for frontal and profile views did not differ, reaction times were significantly faster in general for profile views (i.e. the moving avatar was seen profile on) than for frontal views (i.e. the action was directed toward the observer). Our results suggest that the remarkable well action recognition performance in the visual periphery was not owed to a more socially engaging front facing view. Although action recognition seems to depend on viewpoint, action recognition in general remains remarkable accurate even far into the visual periphery.

Although actions often appear in the visual periphery, little is known about action recognition outside of the fovea. Our previous results have shown that action recognition of moving life-size human stick figures is surprisingly accurate even in far periphery and declines non-linearly with eccentricity. Here, our aim was (1) to investigate the influence of motion information on action recognition in the periphery by comparing static and dynamic stimuli recognition and (2) to assess whether the observed non-linearity in our previous study was caused by the presence of motion because a linear decline of recognition performance with increasing eccentricity was reported with static presentations of objects and animals (Jebara et al. 2009; Thorpe et al. 2001). In our study, 16 participants saw life-size stick figure avatars that carried out six different social actions (three different greetings and three different aggressive actions). The avatars were shown dynamically and statically on a large screen at different positions in the visual field. In a 2AFC paradigm, participants performed 3 tasks with all actions: (a) They assessed their emotional valence; (b) they categorized each of them as greeting or attack and (c) they identified each of the six actions. We found better recognition performance for dynamic stimuli at all eccentricities. Thus motion information helps recognition in the fovea as well as in far periphery. (2) We observed a non-linear decrease of recognition performance for both static and dynamic stimuli. Power law functions with an exponent of 3.4 and 2.9 described the non-linearity observed for dynamic and static actions respectively. These non-linear functions describe the data significantly better (p=.002) than linear functions and suggest that human actions are processed differently from objects or animals