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

Abstract

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.

The impact of visual display of human motion on observers’ perception of music performance

“…The major area of human perception of biological motion requires further research to understand how we grasp, interpret and interact with the world, others and ourselves. Studying it has potential applications for neurodevelopmental diseases [25], individual differences [23], motor learning [51] or interaction in VR environments [32,43,44].…”

“…Within the broader scope of biologic motion perception, four display types are commonly used: traditional video footage [3,6,16,[18][19][20], point-light displays [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33], stick figures [4,14,[34][35][36][37][38][39], and varied animated characters [24,32,[40][41][42][43][44]. Although regular video provides more ecological, realistic representations [18], the other displays enable the de-characterization of the subject, allowing for a better control of extraneous characteristics like gender [16] or dress style [20,45].…”

“…In music performance, it was introduced in a series of pioneer movement studies with musicians for detecting different levels of expressivity [29][30][31]. Recently, PL has been used for studying individual differences of the observers [23], impairments associated with autism [25] and kinaesthetic experiences in virtual reality (VR) [32]. Stick figures and volumetric models eventually emerged from the need to represent body segments and create more realistic representations [50].…”

“…Stick figures and volumetric models eventually emerged from the need to represent body segments and create more realistic representations [50]. Currently, no convention is established about which displays to adopt for perceptual evaluation, and it is possible to find studies integrating either PL, stick figures and animated characters in the last two years [e.g., 23,39,44].…”