Like most ray-finned fishes (Actinopterygii), pipefishes (Syngnathoidei) feed by suction. Most pipefishes reach their prey by a rapid dorso-rotation of the head. In the present study, we analysed the feeding kinematics of the razor fish, Centriscus scutatus, and of the greater pipefish, Syngnathus acus in detail. We found capture times of as little as 4-6ms for C. scutatus and 6-8ms for S. acus. We then hypothesized that the long snout of pipefishes is optimal for such fast feeding. To test this, we implemented in a mathematical model the following considerations. To reach the prey as fast as possible, a low moment of inertia increases the head's angular speed, whereas a long snout decreases the angle over which the head must be turned. The model accurately predicted the snout lengths of a number of pipefishes. We found that the optimal snout length, with which a prey will be reached fastest, is inversely related to its cross-section. In spite of the small cross-section, the development of a long snout can be an evolutionary advantage because this reduces the time to approach the prey.

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When hitting a target that is moving, the time for planning the interception is limited. Instead of waiting for all the necessary information about the target's position and speed before starting to move, subjects could use their previous experience with similar targets to make initial guesses and adjust as new information becomes available. In the present study we examined whether the speed of the preceding target influences a hitting movement. Subjects hit moving targets that appeared on a screen about 40 cm in front of them. The targets moved at 6, 12 or 18 cm/s. Both the hand's initial movement direction and the final hitting error depended on the speed of the preceding target. We conclude that people control the way they hit moving targets on the basis of the speed of the preceding target.

The visual recognition of action can be obtained from the change of body posture over time. Even for point-light stimuli in which the body posture is conveyed by only a few light points, biological motion can be perceived from posture sequence analysis. We present and analyze a formal model of how action recognition may be computed and represented in the brain. This model assumes that motion energy detectors similar to those well-established for the luminance-based motion of objects in space are applied to a cortical representation of body posture. Similar to the spatio-temporal receptive fields of regular motion detectors, these body motion detectors attain receptive fields in a posture-time space. We describe the properties of these receptive fields and compare them with properties of body-sensitive neurons found in the superior temporal sulcus of macaque monkeys. We consider tuning properties for 3D views of static and moving bodies. Our simulations show that key properties of action representation in the STS can directly be explained from the properties of natural action stimuli. Our model also suggests an explanation for the phenomenon of implied motion, the perceptual appearance, and neural activation of motion from static images.

Prosopagnosia is a deficit in recognizing people from their faces. Acquired prosopagnosia results after brain damage, developmental or congenital prosopagnosia (CP) is not caused by brain lesion, but has presumably been present from early childhood onwards. Since other sensory, perceptual, and cognitive abilities are largely spared, CP is considered to be a stimulus-specific deficit, limited to face processing. Given that recent behavioral and imaging studies indicate a close relationship of face and biological-motion perception in healthy adults, we hypothesized that biological motion processing should be impaired in CP. Five individuals with CP and ten matched healthy controls were tested with diverse biological-motion stimuli and tasks. Four of the CP individuals showed severe deficits in biological-motion processing, while one performed within the lower range of the controls. A discriminant analysis classified all participants correctly with a very high probability for each participant. These findings demonstrate that in CP, impaired perception of faces can be accompanied by impaired biological-motion perception. We discuss implications for dedicated and shared mechanisms involved in the perception of faces and biological motion.