Effects of aging on identifying emotions conveyed by point-light walkers.

Abstract

The visual system is able to recognize human motion simply from point lights attached to the major joints of an actor. Moreover, it has been shown that younger adults are able to recognize emotions from such dynamic point-light displays. Previous research has suggested that the ability to perceive emotional stimuli changes with age. For example, it has been shown that older adults are impaired in recognizing emotional expressions from static faces. In addition, it has been shown that older adults have difficulties perceiving visual motion, which might be helpful to recognize emotions from point-light displays. In the current study, 4 experiments were completed in which older and younger adults were asked to identify 3 emotions (happy, sad, and angry) displayed by 4 types of point-light walkers: upright and inverted normal walkers, which contained both local motion and global form information; upright scrambled walkers, which contained only local motion information; and upright random-position walkers, which contained only global form information. Overall, emotion discrimination accuracy was lower in older participants compared with younger participants, specifically when identifying sad and angry point-light walkers. In addition, observers in both age groups were able to recognize emotions from all types of point-light walkers, suggesting that both older and younger adults are able to recognize emotions from point-light walkers on the basis of local motion or global form.

Age-congruency and contact effects in body expression recognition from point-light displays (PLD)

“…This finding is consistent with previous studies, where body expression recognition accuracy was lower in older adults for video clips of fully lit posed body expressions (Ruffman, Ng & Jenkins, 2009; Ruffman, Sullivan & Dittrich, 2009), PLDs of posed body expressions (Insch et al, 2015) and for PLDs of ‘emotional walkers’ (Spencer et al, 2016). Accuracy in body expression recognition was also reduced for child viewers compared to young adults in the present study.…”

Aging and emotions: experience, regulation, and perception

“…For example, older adults are less accurate than younger adults in recognizing emotions from vocalizations, body movements, and dynamic or multimodal expressions [34, 35,36,37,38]. Consistent with past research, these effects appear to be stronger for negative expressions than positive expressions [39].…”

Motion perception as a model for perceptual aging

“…The processing of biological motion is often investigated using point-light walkers, a stimulus that consists of dots representing the major joints of a moving person (Johansson, 1973). Several studies have documented that perception of such point-light walkers is compromised with increasing age (Agnew, Phillips, & Pilz, 2016;Billino et al, 2008;Insch, Bull, Phillips, Allen, & Slessor, 2012;Legault, Troje, & Faubert, 2012;Norman, Payton, Long, & Hawkes, 2004;Spencer, Sekuler, Bennett, Giese, & Pilz, 2016). The majority of studies compared different age groups and only two studies provide data for continuous age samples (Billino et al, 2008;Insch et al, 2012), both suggesting that biological motion perception declines linearly as a function of age.…”