Biological motion

Biological motion is motion that comes from actions of a biological organism. Humans and animals are able to understand those actions through experience, identification, and higher level neural processing. Humans use biological motion to identify and understand familiar actions, which is involved in the neural processes for empathy, communication, and understanding other's intentions. The neural network for biological motion is highly sensitive to the observer's prior experience with the action's biological motions, allowing for embodied learning. This is related to a research field that is broadly known as embodied cognitive science, along with research on mirror neurons. For instance, a well known example of sensitiveness to a specific type of biological motion is expert dancers observing others dancing. Compared to people who do not know how to dance, expert dancers show more sensitiveness to the biological motion from the dance style of their expertise. The same expert dancer wou

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Gender bending: auditory cues affect visual judgements of gender in biological motion displays

Olaf Blanke

The movement of an organism typically provides an observer with information in more than one sensory modality. The integration of information modalities reduces the likelihood that the observer will be confronted with a scene that is perceptually ambiguous. With that in mind, observers were presented with a series of point-light walkers each of which varied in the strength of the gender information they carried. Presenting those stimuli with auditory walking sequences containing ambiguous gender information had no effect on observers' ratings of visually perceived gender. When the visual stimuli were paired with auditory cues that were unambiguously female, observers' judgments of walker gender shifted such that ambiguous walkers were judged to look more female. To show that this is a perceptual rather than a cognitive effect, we induced visual gender after-effects with and without accompanying female auditory cues. The pairing of gender-neutral visual stimuli with unambiguous female auditory cues during adaptation elicited male after-effects. These data suggest that biological motion processing mechanisms can integrate auditory and visual cues to facilitate the extraction of higher-order features like gender. Possible neural substrates are discussed.

Springer Verlag2009

Somatosensory-visual effects in visual biological motion perception

Olaf Blanke, Wenwen Chang, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Manuel Mercier, Pierre Progin

Social cognition is dependent on the ability to extract information from human stimuli. Of those, patterns of biological motion (BM) and in particular walking patterns of other humans, are prime examples. Although most often tested in isolation, BM outside the laboratory is often associated with multisensory cues (i.e. we often hear and see someone walking) and there is evidence that vision-based judgments of BM stimuli are systematically influenced by motor signals. Furthermore, cross-modal visuo-tactile mechanisms have been shown to influence perception of bodily stimuli. Based on these observations, we here investigated if somatosensory inputs would affect visual BM perception. In two experiments, we asked healthy participants to perform a speed discrimination task on two point light walkers (PLW) presented one after the other. In the first experiment, we quantified somatosensory-visual interactions by presenting PLW together with tactile stimuli either on the participants’ forearms or feet soles. In the second experiment, we assessed the specificity of these interactions by presenting tactile stimuli either synchronously or asynchronously with upright or inverted PLW. Our results confirm that somatosensory input in the form of tactile foot stimulation influences visual BM perception. When presented with a seen walker’s footsteps, additional tactile cues enhanced sensitivity on a speed discrimination task, but only if the tactile stimuli were presented on the relevant body-part (under the feet) and when the tactile stimuli were presented synchronously with the seen footsteps of the PLW, whether upright or inverted. Based on these findings we discuss potential mechanisms of somatosensory-visual interactions in BM perception.

2020

Enhanced discriminability for nonbiological motion violating the two-thirds power law

Olaf Blanke, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Roy Salomon, Laurène Véronique Vuillaume

The two-thirds power law describes the relationship between velocity and curvature in human motor movements. Interestingly, this motor law also affects visual motion perception, in which stimuli moving according to the two-thirds power law are perceived to have a constant velocity compared to stimuli actually moving at constant velocity. Thus, visual motion adhering to biological motion principles causes a kinematic illusion of smooth and velocity-invariant motion. However, it is yet unclear how this motion law affects the discrimination of visual stimuli and if its encoding requires attention. Here we tested the perceptual discrimination of stimuli following biological (two-thirds power law) or nonbiological movement under conditions in which the stimuli were degraded or masked through continuous flash suppression. Additionally, we tested subjective perception of naturalness and velocity consistency. Our results show that the discriminability of a visual target is inversely related to the perceived "naturalness" of its movement. Discrimination of stimuli following the two-thirds power law required more time than the same stimuli moving at constant velocity or nonecological variants of the two-thirds power law and was present for both masked and degraded stimuli.

Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO)2016