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.
Recent studies suggest that action video game players exhibit superior performance in visuospatial cognitive tasks compared with non-game players. However, the neural basis underlying this visuospatial cognitive performance advantage remains largely unknown. The present human behavioral and imaging study compared gray matter volume in action video game experts and non-experts using structural magnetic resonance imaging and voxel-based morphometry analysis. The results revealed significantly larger gray matter volume in the right posterior parietal cortex in experts compared with non-experts. Furthermore, the larger gray matter volume in the right posterior parietal cortex significantly correlated with individual performance in a visual working memory task in experts. These results suggest that differences in brain structure may be linked to extensive video game play, leading to superior visuospatial cognitive performance in action video game experts.
SignificanceBietti’s crystalline dystrophy (BCD) is an autosomal recessive, progressive chorioretinal degenerative disease. Retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells are impaired in patients with BCD, but the underlying mechanisms of RPE cell damage have not yet been determined because cells from lesions cannot be readily acquired from patients with BCD. In the present study, we successfully generated a human in vitro model of BCD, BCD patient-specific iPSC-RPE cells, and demonstrated that the accumulation of free cholesterol caused RPE cell damage and subsequent cell death via the induction of lysosomal dysfunction and impairment of autophagy flux in BCD-affected cells. We believe these findings provide evidence of the possible therapeutic efficacy of reducing intracellular free cholesterol in BCD.
The detection of biological motion and the detection of emotion from this motion are important visual functions with obvious survival and social values. The perception of biological motion is remarkably robust, and numerous studies have shown that the emotional states of a person can be deduced from point-light biological motion. In the present study, we investigated the extent to which the detection of emotion from biological motion is linked to the explicit detection of human gait. Subjects performed gait detection and emotion detection for the same stimulus. The stimulus consisted of one coherent interval and one scrambled biological-motion interval, each of which contained one emotionally neutral and one emotional (angry or happy) walker. Significant correlations with gait detection performance were observed for anger detection but not necessarily for happiness detection, implying that the detection of anger may be more strongly linked to explicit gait detection. This leads to a hypothesis that differential dependence may reflect the differential behavioural meaning between anger and happiness detection; it may be more crucial to localise or identify a person with anger than happiness.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.