The mental representation of movement when static stimuli are viewed

Abstract

If the representation of movement is a fundamental organizing principle of cognition, as hypothesized here, it should be possible to find cases in which static stimuli induce a dynamic mental representation. Subjects viewed frozen-action photographs, and their memory for these scenes was tested. They found it harder to reject distractors when the distractors were photographs of the same scene shot later in time than when the distractors were photographs shot earlier in time. In a second study, an asymmetry in goodness of apparent motion was found between forward and backward action sequences. Both results support the hypothesis that people represent the motion implicit in a photograph. © 1983 Psychonomic Society, Inc.