Individual differences in the perception of biological motion and fragmented figures are not correlated

Jung, Eunice L.; Zadbood, Asieh; Lee, Sang-Hun; Tomarken, Andrew J.; Blake, Randolph

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00795

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 116 publications

(128 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…perhaps due to less familiarity or experience with salsa dancing). Notably, previous studies have documented significant individual differences in terms of biological motion perception [35] – [37] , action adaptability [38] , and fMRI brain responses to biological motion [39] . Understanding why some participants may have inherent difficulty perceiving social interactions could provide an interesting avenue of research for future studies of individual differences in biological motion perception in both normal and clinical populations [40] .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception of Social Interactions for Spatially Scrambled Biological Motion

Thurman

2014

PLoS ONE

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

It is vitally important for humans to detect living creatures in the environment and to analyze their behavior to facilitate action understanding and high-level social inference. The current study employed naturalistic point-light animations to examine the ability of human observers to spontaneously identify and discriminate socially interactive behaviors between two human agents. Specifically, we investigated the importance of global body form, intrinsic joint movements, extrinsic whole-body movements, and critically, the congruency between intrinsic and extrinsic motions. Motion congruency is hypothesized to be particularly important because of the constraint it imposes on naturalistic action due to the inherent causal relationship between limb movements and whole body motion. Using a free response paradigm in Experiment 1, we discovered that many naïve observers (55%) spontaneously attributed animate and/or social traits to spatially-scrambled displays of interpersonal interaction. Total stimulus motion energy was strongly correlated with the likelihood that an observer would attribute animate/social traits, as opposed to physical/mechanical traits, to the scrambled dot stimuli. In Experiment 2, we found that participants could identify interactions between spatially-scrambled displays of human dance as long as congruency was maintained between intrinsic/extrinsic movements. Violating the motion congruency constraint resulted in chance discrimination performance for the spatially-scrambled displays. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that scrambled point-light dancing animations violating this constraint were also rated as significantly less interactive than animations with congruent intrinsic/extrinsic motion. These results demonstrate the importance of intrinsic/extrinsic motion congruency for biological motion analysis, and support a theoretical framework in which early visual filters help to detect animate agents in the environment based on several fundamental constraints. Only after satisfying these basic constraints could stimuli be evaluated for high-level social content. In this way, we posit that perceptual animacy may serve as a gateway to higher-level processes that support action understanding and social inference.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception of Social Interactions for Spatially Scrambled Biological Motion

Thurman

2014

PLoS ONE

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Thus, researchers have utilized larger participant samples to explore individual differences in biological motion perception, sometimes with contradictory results. These studies have shown that the ability to perceive a fragmented figure within static visual noise is not correlated with the ability to perceive a point-light biological motion display within dynamic visual noise, suggesting that these separate perceptual abilities may be tied to separate neural processes (Jung et al, 2013). However, results of a study by Thomson and Watt (2013) suggest a possible relationship between the perception of embedded figures and biological motion perception.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…These various previous studies have clearly shown individual differences in biological motion perception in humans. In humans these differences include correlations between figure segregation and biological motion perception (Thomson & Watt, 2013, but see Jung et al, 2013), a facing the viewer bias and social interaction anxiety/ inhibition ability (Heenan & Troje, 2015), empathy and biological motion facing (Miller & Saygin, 2013), and motion imagery and direction of biological motion (Miller & Saygin, 2013). Miller andSaygin (2013) claimed (andTroje &Aust, 2013 agreed) that the direction of motion task taps local (motion) neural processes and the facing task taps global (form) neural processes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual Observer Differences in the Use of Form and Motion to Perceive the Actor’s Sex in Biological Motion Displays

et al. 2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent research has shown that the perception of biological motion may be influenced by aspects of the observer’s personality. In this study, we sought to determine how participant characteristics (including demographics, response inhibition, autism spectrum quotient, empathy, social anxiety, and motion imagery) might influence the use of form and motion to identify the actor’s sex in biological motion displays. We varied the degree of form and motion in biological motion displays and correlated 76 young adult participants’ performances for identifying the actor’s sex in these varied conditions with their individual differences on variables of interest. Differences in the separate use of form and motion cues were predictive of participant performance generally, with use of form most predictive of performance. Female participants relied primarily on form information, while male participants relied primarily on motion information. Participants less able to visualize movement tended to be better at using form information in the biological motion task. Overall, our findings suggest that similar group level performances across participants in identifying the sex of the actor in a biological motion task may result from quite different individual processing.

show abstract

A new technique for generating disordered point-light animations for the study of biological motion perception

Kim¹,

Jung²,

Lee³

et al. 2015

Journal of Vision

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Studies of biological motion perception often use stimuli depicting human actions portrayed via point-light (PL) displays. Typically, counterpart, or control, stimuli for PL biological motion are created by spatially scrambling motion trajectories of individual PL dots. Depending on the purpose of the study, however, this procedure may be inappropriate as a foil for genuine PL animations, because spatial scrambling not only disrupts coherent motion activity but also eliminates pair-wise motion relationships among dots and, unless corrected, alters the spatial spread of PL dot motions. We introduce a new technique for producing perturbed PL animations, called pair-wise shuffled motion, that preserves the elementary features of biological motion in spatial and motion energy domains and only disrupts the specific sense of global, coherent perception of biological motion. First we describe the procedure for creating pair-wise shuffled motion sequences. Next we compare unperturbed PL animations to pair-wise shuffled motion, to spatially scrambled motion, and to spatially constrained scrambled motion in terms of spatial distributions of the dots, spatiotemporal amplitude spectra derived from Fourier analysis of those sequences, and space-time motion energy associated with those perturbed animations. We then show that the results from those analyses generalize to a large family of PL animations, including the widely used PL walker. Finally we present results from a two-interval forced-choice biological-motion discrimination experiment comparing the robustness of scrambled and pair-wise shuffled motions as foil stimuli. Results from these comparisons suggest that pair-wise shuffled motion offers advantages as a foil stimulus compared to foils using the conventional scrambling technique. Pair-wise shuffled motion provides an additional, effective control display for evaluating PL biological motion perception in future psychophysical, computational, and imaging studies that focus on mechanisms of processing spatiotemporal information signifying biological motion within PL displays.

show abstract

Individual differences in the perception of biological motion and fragmented figures are not correlated

Cited by 3 publications

References 116 publications

Perception of Social Interactions for Spatially Scrambled Biological Motion

Perception of Social Interactions for Spatially Scrambled Biological Motion

Individual Observer Differences in the Use of Form and Motion to Perceive the Actor’s Sex in Biological Motion Displays

A new technique for generating disordered point-light animations for the study of biological motion perception

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About