Adaptation aftereffects in the perception of gender from biological motion

Human visual perception is highly adaptive. While this has been known and studied for a long time in domains such as color vision, motion perception, or the processing of spatial frequency, a number of more recent studies have shown that adaptation and adaptation aftereffects also occur in high-level visual domains like shape perception and face recognition. Here, we present data that demonstrate a pronounced aftereffect in response to adaptation to the perceived gender of biological motion point-light walkers. A walker that is perceived to be ambiguous in gender under neutral adaptation appears to be male after adaptation with an exaggerated female walker and female after adaptation with an exaggerated male walker. We discuss this adaptation aftereffect as a tool to characterize and probe the mechanisms underlying biological motion perception.     

Gaze patterns during perception of direction and gender from biological motion

Humans can perceive many properties of a creature in motion from the movement of the major joints alone. However it is likely that some regions of the body are more informative than others, dependent on the task. We recorded eye movements while participants performed two tasks with point-light walkers: determining the direction of walking, or determining the walker's gender. To vary task difficulty, walkers were displayed from different view angles and with different degrees of expressed gender. The effects on eye movement were evaluated by generating fixation maps, and by analyzing the number of fixations in regions of interest representing the shoulders, pelvis, and feet. In both tasks participants frequently fixated the pelvis region, but there were relatively more fixations at the shoulders in the gender task, and more fixations at the feet in the direction task. Increasing direction task difficulty increased the focus on the foot region. An individual's task performance could not be predicted by their distribution of fixations. However by showing where observers seek information, the study supports previous findings that the feet play an important part in the perception of walking direction, and that the shoulders and hips are particularly important for the perception of gender.     

Perception of animacy and direction from local biological motion signals

We present three experiments that investigated the perception of animacy and direction from local biological motion cues. Coherent and scrambled point-light displays of humans, cats, and pigeons that were upright or inverted were embedded in a random dot mask and presented to naive observers. Observers assessed the animacy of the walker on a six-point Likert scale in Experiment 1, discriminated the direction of walking in Experiment 2, and completed both the animacy rating and the direction discrimination tasks in Experiment 3. We show that like the ability to discriminate direction, the perception of animacy from scrambled displays that contain solely local cues is orientation specific and can be well-elicited within exposure times as short as 200 ms. We show further that animacy ratings attributed to our stimuli are linearly correlated with the ability to discriminate their direction of walking. We conclude that the mechanisms responsible for processing local biological motion signals not only retrieve locomotive direction but also aid in assessing the presence of animate agents in the visual environment.     

Detection of biological and nonbiological motion

Often it is claimed that humans are particularly sensitive to biological motion. Here, sensitivity as a detection advantage for biological over nonbiological motion is examined. Previous studies comparing biological motion to nonbiological motion have not used appropriate masks or have not taken into account the underlying form present in biological motion. The studies reported here compare the detection of biological motion to nonbiological motion with and without form. Target animation sequences represented a walking human, an unstructured translation and rotation, and a structured translation and rotation. Both the number of mask dots and the size of the target varied across trials. The results show that biological motion is easier to detect than unstructured nonbiological motion but is not easier to detect than structured nonbiological motion. The results cannot be explained by learning over the course of data collection. Additional analyses show that mask density explains masking of different size target areas and is not specific to detection tasks. These data show that humans are not better at detecting biological motion compared to nonbiological motion in a mask. Any differences in detection performance between biological motion and nonbiological motion may be in part because biological motion always contains an underlying form.     

Illusory surfaces affect the integration of local motion signals

A 2IFC paradigm was used to measure speed discrimination thresholds for pairs of Gabor patches. When one of these patches was phenomenally placed over an illusory surface (IS), we observed higher thresholds relative to control conditions without ISs. Additional controls demonstrated that this effect was due to the placement of the patch on a different phenomenal depth plane rather than to the mere presence of an IS. We conclude that (i) ISs can affect the long-range integration of local motion signals, and (ii) long-range motion integration obeys a coplanarity principle.     

Amblyopic perception of biological motion

Although a number of low-level visual deficits in amblyopia have been identified, it is still unclear to what extent these deficits extend throughout the visual processing hierarchy. Biological motion perception can be a useful measure of local and global visual processing since the point-light stimuli that are often used to study this ability carry both local motion and global form information. To investigate the integrity of the biological motion processing system in amblyopia, we employed both detection and discrimination tasks with coherent or scrambled point-light walkers either alone or embedded in different types of point-light masks. These manipulations allowed for control over the amount of form and/or motion information available to the observers that could be used for task performance. We found that amblyopic eyes could process both the global form and local motion components of point-light walkers, indicating intact processing for these stimuli. However, amblyopic eyes did show an increased susceptibility to the addition of masking dots suggesting that segregation of signal from noise is deficient in amblyopia.     

Moving contexts do affect the perceived direction of apparent motion in motion competition displays

Three experiments were performed to test Ullman's [The Interpretation of Visual Motion. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. (1979)] independence hypothesis, used in the minimal mapping theory of motion correspondence. Subjects were required to detect the direction of motion (left vs right) of an element in a motion competition display. In control conditions, threshold interelement distances were obtained for this task in the absence of any moving context. In experimental conditions, context elements that moved either to the left or to the right were added to the display. This resulted in changes in thresholds (relative to the control condition) that indicated that a context moving in one direction increased the probability of seeing the competition element move in the same direction. The magnitude of the context effect was shown to be related to the proximity of the context to the competition display, as well as to the number of elements in the context. These results are in conflict with Ullman's independence hypothesis. An alternative model of the motion correspondence process, which uses information about interdependencies between element movements, is briefly discussed.     

Eye movements affect the perceived speed of visual motion.

Eye movements add a constant displacement to the visual scene, altering the retinal-image velocity. Therefore, in order to recover the real world motion, eye-movement effects must be compensated. If full compensation occurs, the perceived speed of a moving object should be the same regardless of whether the eye is stationary or moving. Using a pursue-fixate procedure in a perceptual matching paradigm, we found that eye movements systematically bias the perceived speed of the distal stimulus, indicating a lack of compensation. Speed judgments depended on the interaction between the distal stimulus size and the eye velocity relative to the distal stimulus motion. When the eyes and distal stimulus moved in the same direction, speed judgments of the distal stimulus approximately matched its retinal-image motion. When the eyes and distal stimulus moved in the opposite direction, speed judgments depended on the stimulus size. For small sizes, perceived speed was typically overestimated. For large sizes, perceived speed was underestimated. Results are explained in terms of retinal-extraretinal interactions and correlate with recent neurophysiological findings.     

Critical features for the recognition of biological motion

Humans can perceive the motion of living beings from very impoverished stimuli like point-light displays. How the visual system achieves the robust generalization from normal to point-light stimuli remains an unresolved question. We present evidence on multiple levels demonstrating that this generalization might be accomplished by an extraction of simple mid-level optic flow features within coarse spatial arrangement, potentially exploiting relatively simple neural circuits: (1) A statistical analysis of the most informative mid-level features reveals that normal and point-light walkers share very similar dominant local optic flow features. (2) We devise a novel point-light stimulus (critical features stimulus) that contains these features, and which is perceived as a human walker even though it is inconsistent with the skeleton of the human body. (3) A neural model that extracts only these critical features accounts for substantial recognition rates for strongly degraded stimuli. We conclude that recognition of biological motion might be accomplished by detecting mid-level optic flow features with relatively coarse spatial localization. The computationally challenging reconstruction of precise position information from degraded stimuli might not be required.     

Perception of coherent motion, biological motion and form-from-motion under dim-light conditions

Three experiments investigated several aspects of motion perception at high and low luminance levels. Detection of weak coherent motion in random dot cinematograms was unaffected by light level over a range of dot speeds. The ability to judge form from motion was, however, impaired at low light levels, as was the ability to discriminate normal from phase-scrambled biological motion sequences. The difficulty distinguishing differential motions may be explained by increased spatial pooling at low light levels.     

Intact "biological motion" and "structure from motion" perception in a patient with impaired motion mechanisms: a case study

A series of psychophysical tests examining early and later aspects of image-motion processing were conducted in a patient with bilateral lesions involving the posterior visual pathways, affecting the lateral parietal-temporal-occipital cortex and the underlying white matter (as shown by magnetic resonance imaging studies and confirmed by neuro-ophthalmological and neuropsychological examinations). Visual acuity, form discrimination, color, and contrast-sensitivity discrimination were normal whereas spatial localization, line bisection, depth, and binocular stereopsis were severely impaired. Performance on early motion tasks was very poor. These include seeing coherent motion in random noise (Newsome & Paré, 1988), speed discrimination, and seeing two-dimensional form from relative speed of motion. However, on higher-order motion tasks the patient was able to identify actions from the evolving pattern of dots placed at the joints of a human actor (Johansson, 1973) as well as discriminating three-dimensional structure of a cylinder from motion in a dynamic random-dot field. The pattern of these results is at odds with the hypothesis that precise metrical comparison of early motion measurements is necessary for higher-order "structure from motion" tasks.     

Reference repulsion in the categorical perception of biological motion

Perceiving biological motion is important for understanding the intentions and future actions of others. Perceiving an approaching person’s behavior may be particularly important, because such behavior often precedes social interaction. To this end, the visual system may devote extra resources for perceiving an oncoming person’s heading. If this were true, humans should show increased sensitivity for perceiving approaching headings, and as a result, a repulsive perceptual effect around the categorical boundary of leftward/rightward motion. We tested these predictions and found evidence for both. First, observers were especially sensitive to the heading of an approaching person; variability in estimates of a person’s heading decreased near the category boundary of leftward/rightward motion. Second, we found a repulsion effect around the category boundary; a person walking approximately toward the observer was perceived as being repelled away from straight ahead. This repulsive effect was greatly exaggerated for perception of a very briefly presented person or perception of a chaotic crowd, suggesting that repulsion may protect against categorical errors when sensory noise is high. The repulsion effect with a crowd required integration of local motion and human form, suggesting an origin in high-level stages of visual processing. Similar repulsive effects may underlie categorical perception with other social features. Overall, our results show that a person’s direction of walking is categorically perceived, with improved sensitivity at the category boundary and a concomitant repulsion effect.     

Effects of aging on biological motion discrimination

Previous studies have shown that older subjects have difficulties discriminating the walking direction of point-light walkers. In two experiments, we investigated the underlying cause in further detail. In Experiment 1, subjects had to discriminate the walking direction of upright and inverted point-light walkers in a cloud of randomly moving dots. In general, older subjects performed less accurately and showed an increased inversion effect. Nevertheless, they were as accurate as young subjects for upright walkers during training, in which no noise was added to the display. These results indicate that older subjects are less able to extract relevant information from noisy displays. In Experiment 2, subjects discriminated the walking direction of scrambled walkers that primarily contained local motion information, random-position walkers that primarily contained global form information, and normal point-light walkers that contained both kinds of information. Both age groups performed at chance when no global form information was present in the display but were equally accurate for walkers that only contained global form information. However, when both local motion and global form information were present in the display, older subjects were less accurate then younger subjects. Older subjects again exhibited an increased inversion effect. These results indicate that both older and younger subjects rely more on global form than local motion to discriminate the direction of point-light walkers. Also, older subjects seem to have difficulties integrating global form and local motion information as efficiently as younger subjects.     

Frames of reference for biological motion and face perception

We investigated the roles of egocentric, gravitational, and visual environmental reference frames for face and biological motion perception. We tested observers on face and biological motion tasks while orienting the visual environment and the observer independently with respect to gravity using the York Tumbling Room. The relative contribution of each reference frame was assessed by arranging pairs of frames to be either aligned or opposed to each other while rendering the third uninformative by orienting it sideways relative to the stimulus. The perception of both biological motion and faces were optimal when the stimulus was aligned with egocentric coordinates. However, when the egocentric reference frame was rendered uninformative, the perception of biological motion, but not faces, relied more on stimulus alignment with gravity rather than the visual environment.     

Measurement of generalization fields for the recognition of biological motion

The human visual system processes complex biological motion stimuli with high sensitivity and selectivity. The characterization of spatio-temporal generalization in the perception of biological motion is still a largely unresolved problem. We present an experiment that investigates how the visual system responds to motion stimuli that interpolate spatio-temporally between natural biological motion patterns. Inspired by analogous studies in stationary object recognition, we generated stimuli that interpolate between natural perceptual categories by morphing. Spatio-temporal morphs between natural movement patterns were obtained with a technique that allows to calculate linear combinations of spatio-temporal patterns. The weights of such linear combinations define a linear metric space over the set of generated movement patterns, so that the spatio-temporal similarity of the motion patterns can be quantified. In our experiments, we found smooth and continuous variation of the categorization probabilities with the weights of the prototypes in the morphs. For bipedal locomotion patterns we could accurately predict the perceived properties of the morphs by linear combinations of the perceived properties of the prototypes. Such predictions were not possible for morphs between locomotion and very dissimilar movements. We conclude that the visual system shows generalization within classes of motion patterns with similar basic structure, such as bipedal locomotion.     

The efficiency of speed discrimination for coherent and transparent motion

Transparent motion involves the integration and segmentation of local motion signals. Previous research found a cost for processing transparent random dot motions relative to single coherent motions. However, this cost can be the result of the increased complexity of the transparent stimuli. We investigated this possibility by measuring the efficiency of transparent and coherent motions. Since efficiency normalises human performance to that of an ideal observer in the same task, performance can be compared fairly across tasks. Our task, identical in both transparent and coherent conditions, was to discriminate the fastest speed between two opposite motion directions. In two experiments where we varied dot density and speed, we confirmed the cost in human sensitivity for transparent motion but also found a cost for the ideal observer. The outcome was a consistent residual cost in efficiency for transparent motion. This result points to a processing limitation for transparent motion analogous to previously suggested inhibitory mechanisms between opposite directions of motion. Furthermore, we found that both transparent and coherent motion efficiencies decreased as dot density increased. This latter result stresses the importance of the correspondence problem and suggests that local motion signals are integrated over large areas.     

Brain activity evoked by inverted and imagined biological motion

Previous imaging research has identified an area on the human posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) activated upon viewing biological motion. The current experiments explore the relationship between neural activity within this region and perceptual experience. Biological motion perception is orientation dependent: inverting point-light animations make them more difficult to see. We measured activity levels within this region as observers viewed inverted point-light animations. We also measured neural activity while observers imagined biological motion and compared it to that measured while observers viewed the animations. In both experiments we found that the BOLD response was modulated with perceptual experience. Viewing inverted biological motion activated posterior STS more than scrambled motion, but less than upright biological motion. Mental imagery of biological motion was also sufficient to activate this region in most of our observers, but the level of activity was weaker than during actual viewing of the motion animations.     

Eccentric perception of biological motion is unscalably poor

Accurately perceiving the activities of other people is a crucially important social skill of obvious survival value. Human vision is equipped with highly sensitive mechanisms for recognizing activities performed by others [Johansson, G. (1973). Visual perception of biological motion and a model for its analysis. Perception and Psychophysics, 14, 201; Johansson, G. (1976). Spatio-temporal differentiation and integration in visual motion perception: An experimental and theoretical analysis of calculus-like functions in visual data processing. Psychological Research, 38, 379]. One putative functional role of biological motion perception is to register the presence of biological events anywhere within the visual field, not just within central vision. To assess the salience of biological motion throughout the visual field, we compared the detectability performances of biological motion animations imaged in central vision and in peripheral vision. To compensate for the poorer spatial resolution within the periphery, we spatially magnified the motion tokens defining biological motion. Normal and scrambled biological motion sequences were embedded in motion noise and presented in two successively viewed intervals on each trial (2AFC). Subjects indicated which of the two intervals contained normal biological motion. A staircase procedure varied the number of noise dots to produce a criterion level of discrimination performance. For both foveal and peripheral viewing, performance increased but saturated with stimulus size. Foveal and peripheral performance could not be equated by any magnitude of size scaling. Moreover, the inversion effect--superiority of upright over inverted biological motion [Sumi, S. (1984). Upside-down presentation of the Johansson moving light-spot pattern. Perception, 13, 283]--was found only when animations were viewed within the central visual field. Evidently the neural resource responsible for biological motion perception are embodied within neural mechanisms focused on central vision.     

Perceptual and computational analysis of critical features for biological motion

Among the most common events in our daily lives is seeing people in action. Scientists have accumulated evidence suggesting humans may have developed specialized mechanisms for recognizing these visual events. In the current experiments, we apply the "bubbles" technique to construct space-time classification movies that reveal the key features human observers use to discriminate biological motion stimuli (point-light and stick figure walkers). We find that observers rely on similar features for both types of stimuli, namely, form information in the upper body and dynamic information in the relative motion of the limbs. To measure the contributions of motion and form analyses in this task, we computed classification movies from the responses of a biologically plausible model that can discriminate biological motion patterns (M. A. Giese & T. Poggio, 2003). The model classification movies reveal similar key features to observers, with the model's motion and form pathways each capturing unique aspects of human performance. In a second experiment, we computed classification movies derived from trials of varying exposure times (67-267 ms) and demonstrate the transition to form-based strategies as motion information becomes less available. Overall, these results highlight the relative contributions of motion and form computations to biological motion perception.     

Stimulus magnification equates identification and discrimination of biological motion across the visual field

There is conflicting evidence about whether stimulus magnification is sufficient to equate the discriminability of point-light walkers across the visual field. We measured the accuracy with which observers could report the directions of point-light walkers moving ±4° from the line of sight, and the accuracy with which they could identify five different point-light walkers. In both cases accuracy was measured over a sevenfold range of sizes at eccentricities from 0° to 16° in the right visual field. In most cases observers (N = 6) achieved 100% accuracy at the largest stimulus sizes (20° height) at all eccentricities. In both tasks the psychometric functions at each eccentricity were shifted versions of each other on a log-size axis. Therefore, by dividing stimulus size at each eccentricity (E) by an appropriate F = 1 + E/E₂ (where E₂ represents the eccentricity at which stimulus size must double to achieve equivalent-to-foveal performance) all data could be fit with a single function. The average E₂ value was .91 (SEM = .19, N = 6) in the walker-direction discrimination task and 1.34 (SEM = .21, N = 6) in the walker identification task. We conclude that size scaling is sufficient to equate discrimination and identification of point-light walkers across the visual field.