Following Other People’s Footsteps: A Contextual-Attraction Effect Induced by Biological Motion

Abstract

Our visual system is bombarded with numerous social interactions that form intangible social bonds among people, as exemplified by synchronized walking in crowds. Here, we investigated whether these perceived social bonds implicitly intrude on visual perception and induce a contextual effect. Using multiple point-light walkers and a classical contextual paradigm, we tested 72 college-age adults across six experiments and found that the perceived direction of the central walker was attracted toward the direction of the surrounding walkers. The observed contextual-attraction effect occurred even when the surrounding walkers differed from the central walker in gender and walking speed but disappeared when they were asynchronously presented or replaced by inanimate motion. Strikingly, this contextual-attraction effect partially persisted in the context of local motion rather than static figures. These findings, in contrast to the typical contextual-repulsion effect, lend support for the distinctiveness of perceived social bonds on contextual modulation and suggest a specialized contextual mechanism tuned to social factors.

Looking more masculine among females: Spatial context modulates gender perception of face and biological motion

“…Different from the simultaneous contrast effect of gender observed here, there are some other studies showing an assimilation contextual effect in space (e.g., on emotion in Lecker et al, 2020; Lecker et al, 2017; on walking direction in Cheng et al, 2022). Generally, these effects can be well accounted for by a perceptual bias induced by prior experience rather than lateral inhibition.…”

“…It should be noted that previous studies investigating the spatial contextual effect of high‐level visual features did not reveal such a contrast effect (Bindemann et al, 2005; Cheng et al, 2022; Lecker et al, 2017, 2020). In a flanker task, Bindemann et al (2005) did not observe a reaction facilitation in judging the gender of a central face when it was congruent than incongruent with the gender of the simultaneously presented surrounding faces, possibly because that face gender judgement was less susceptible to its context if the test faces were with explicit gender information.…”

Evidence for a role of synchrony but not common fate in the perception of biological group movements

“…These results add onto a burgeoning literature investigating synchrony in social perception (Alp et al, 2017; Cheng et al, 2022; Cracco, Lee, et al, 2022; Tsantani et al, 2022). In a functional MRI study, Tsantani et al (2022) showed that synchrony between the head movements of two agents could be decoded in brain areas of the social perception network, such as the posterior superior temporal cortex and the extrastriate body area.…”

“…Recent research has provided initial evidence that synchrony can indeed shape the processing of other people’s actions (Alp et al, 2017; Cheng et al, 2022; Cracco, Lee, et al, 2022; Tsantani et al, 2022) or emotional expressions (Elias et al, 2017). However, in addition to being restricted to synchrony, this research has not yet established whether these effects are specific to biological agents or are more general in nature.…”

Effect of spatial context on perceived walking direction

“…In the context of perceived walking direction, repeated exposure to a specific walking direction (e.g., viewing an animated stimulus walking to the left) produces a repulsive perceptual aftereffect, such that the perceived angle at which subsequently presented stimuli are perceived as walking is biased away from the angle to which the observer was adapted ( Jackson & Blake, 2010 ; Chen, Boyce, Palmer, & Clifford, 2023 ). In contrast, Cheng, Liu, Yuan, and Jiang (2022) recently found an attractive effect of spatial context on perceived walking direction, such that the perceived direction of a walker was biased toward the walking direction of a set of surrounding walkers. Although no single study has yet compared spatial and temporal effects on the perception of walking direction, these previous studies raise a question of why these effects seem to differ in being attractive and repulsive, respectively.…”