Are chimpanzees Futurists? Effects of motion lines and motion blur on the judgments of global motion direction in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

Abstract

Based on the invention and development of photography and movie in the 19th century, schools of contemporary art, such as Futurism, have emerged that express the dynamism of motion in painting. Painting techniques such as multiple stroboscopic images, motion blur, and motion lines are culturally-based, but the biological basis of their perception has also been intensively investigated recently. Then what are the evolutionary origins of such pictorial representations of motion? Do nonhuman animals also have sensitivity to such representations? To address this question, we examined the effects of motion blur and motion lines on the judgments of global motion directions in chimpanzees. The results showed that the motion lines biased the chimpanzees' judgments toward the direction of motion implied by them, whereas the effect of the motion blur was either absent or weak (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, we manipulated the length and number of motion lines to examine the effect of "speed" and "distance" in addition to the motion direction implied by the motion lines. The results showed that the effect of motion lines became stronger as the length and the number of lines increased within a specific range. These results indicate that the motion lines also imply the direction of motion in chimpanzees and provide a clue to the evolutionary basis for the pictorial representations of motion.