The role of spatial and temporal information in biological motion perception

• Authors: Joachim Lange , Markus Lappe

Abstracts

EN

Point-light biological motion stimuli provide spa-tio-temporal information about the structure of the human body in motion. Manipulation of the spatial structure of point-light stimuli reduces the ability of human observers to perceive biological motion. A recent study has reported that interference with the spatial structure of point-light walkers also reduces the evoked event-related potentials over the occipitotemporal cortex, but that interference with the temporal structure of the stimuli evoked event-related potentials similar to normal biological motion stimuli. We systematically investigated the influence of spatial and temporal manipulation on 2 common discrimination tasks and compared it with predictions of a neurocomputational model previously proposed. This model first analyzes the spatial structure of the stimulus independently of the temporal information to derive body posture and subsequently analyzes the temporal sequence of body postures to derive movement direction. Similar to the model predictions, the psychophysical results show that human observers need only intact spatial configuration of the stimulus to discriminate the facing direction of a point-light walker. In contrast, movement direction discrimination needs a fully intact spatio-temporal pattern of the stimulus. The activation levels in the model predict the observed event-related potentials for the spatial and temporal manipulations.

Keywords

EN

biological motion; model; task dependency; event-related potentials

• Publisher: Wyższa Szkoła Finansów i Zarządzania w Warszawie
• Journal: Advances in Cognitive Psychology
• Year: 2007
• Volume: 3
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 419-428

Contributors

author

Joachim Lange

author

Markus Lappe

• Department of Psychology II, University of Muenster, Germany

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10053-008-0006-3