Introduction The ability to identify and interpret the movements and actions of others is fundamental to visual perception and cognition. It is important for effective communication and social interaction. The motions of living organisms such as people or animals - both whole-body motion as well as partial movements by hands, head, eye, and so on - are typically referred to as biological motions (Blake and Shiffrar, 2007; Johansson, 1973). This form of motion is central to our perception of the dynamic natural environment and for the process of inferring intent from the actions of others. Humans have a remarkable ability to recognize these stimuli. We can detect and interpret actions on the basis of only minimal information and in the presence of considerable visual noise and clutter. Even more remarkably, a basic sensitivity to biological motion appears to be present at or very soon after birth (Simion et al., 2008). The presence of this ability very early in life might allow us to detect conspecifics, such as a mother, in order to find food, protection, and care. Empirical research into biological motion dates back to Marey (1884) and his study of human and animal kinematics through the use of “chronophotography,” which involves capturing successive single images of a moving figure using a high-speed camera. However, it was the development of the point-light technique by Swedish psychologist Gunnar Johansson in the early 1970s that led to much of the modern research into how we perceive and understand the actions of others. Johansson discovered that by attaching lights to the joints of an actor and then filming the actor in near-darkness he could produce a stimulus that captured the dynamic motion information associated with human actions, with only minimal form details. This is illustrated in Figure 21.1. Points of light (e.g., light emitting diodes) are placed on the major joints of a moving actor and are filmed in low ambient light, such as in a dark room. Simple video postprocessing, such as increasing the contrast, can produce effective point-light biological motion stimuli. More recently, several labs (e.g., http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/) have published online databases of more sophistic motion capture data that can be used to create biological motion stimuli.
CITATION STYLE
Thompson, J. (2015). Biological motion perception. In The Cambridge Handbook of Applied Perception Research (pp. 427–442). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511973017.028
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