Seeing biological motion

Neri, Peter; Morrone, Maria Concetta; Burr, David

doi:10.1038/27661

Cited by 290 publications

(249 citation statements)

References 17 publications

(16 reference statements)

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“…In fact, stimuli can be degraded even more without abolishing recognition of the model. Consistent with psychophysical results, the model can even recognize point light stimuli when the individual dots have a limited life time (46). Point light stimuli can be degraded also by removing individual dots from the figure.…”

Section: Simulation Results and Predictionssupporting

confidence: 69%

Biologically Plausible Neural Model for the Recognition of Biological Motion and Actions

Giese¹,

Poggio²

2002

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Section: Simulation Results and Predictionssupporting

confidence: 69%

Biologically Plausible Neural Model for the Recognition of Biological Motion and Actions

Giese¹,

Poggio²

2002

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“…This explanation, and the fact that performance strongly increases with number of dots (see also ref. 10) would suggest that form analysis plays a dominant role in the perception of biological motion. These findings corroborate the previous results from the spontaneous recognition experiment, suggesting that biological motion perception does not rely on local image motion.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception of biological motion without local image motion

Beintema

Lappe

2002

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

228

197

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A vivid perception of the moving form of a human figure can be obtained from a few moving light points on the joints of the body. This is known as biological motion perception. It is commonly believed that the perception of biological motion rests on image motion signals. Curiously, however, some patients with lesions to motion processing areas of the dorsal stream are severely impaired in image motion perception but can easily perceive biological motion. Here we describe a biological motion stimulus based on a limited lifetime technique that tests the perception of a moving human figure in the absence of local image motion. We find that subjects can spontaneously recognize a moving human figure in displays without local image motion. Their performance is very similar to that for classic point-light displays. We also find that tasks involving the discrimination of walking direction or the coherence of a walking figure can be performed in the absence of image motion. Thus, although image motion may generally aid processes such as segmenting figure from background, we propose that it is not the basis for the percept of biological motion. Rather, we suggest biological motion is derived from dynamic form information on body posture evolving over time.T he phenomenon of biological motion perception was demonstrated by Johannson (1). He showed that a dozen moving light points, attached to the joints of the body, suffices to create a rich perception of a moving human figure. Biological motion is a highly complex motion pattern and an extreme example of the sophistication of pattern analysis in the brain. It is also interesting because it links the perception of motion with the perception of form, two qualities that involve largely different cortical processing streams (2). Form analysis is carried out in the ventral stream whereas image motion is processed in areas of the dorsal stream. Selectivity for biological motion has been found in the superior temporal polysensory area (3, 4), which receives input from both processing streams. Patients with lesions to motion processing areas of the dorsal stream are severely impaired in image motion perception but can easily perceive biological motion (5, 6). This finding could suggest that biological motion perception does not rely on the analysis of image motion signals. Here, we test this hypothesis by using a stimulus in which we manipulate the amount of local image motion that is consistent with movement of the limbs.Standard biological motion stimuli ( Fig. 1a and Movie 1, which is available as supporting information on the PNAS web site, www.pnas.org) consist of a frame animation of the motion of light points attached to the joints of a moving human figure (7). The moving pattern of dots in this case contains information about the position of points on the body and about the motion of these points over time. The motion signal is carried by the apparent image motion of each individual point in two successive animation frames. The stimuli we created dissociate these two sou...

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“…The visual response to the 2/3 power law may reflect sensitivity of the visual system to natural motion (33) or the influence of motor production on motion perception (13). Alternatively, the visual, somato-sensory, and motor systems may use a common amodal representation of motion (28).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural representations of kinematic laws of motion: Evidence for action-perception coupling

Dayan

Casile

Levit‐Binnun

et al. 2007

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

142

109

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Behavioral and modeling studies have established that curved and drawing human hand movements obey the 2/3 power law, which dictates a strong coupling between movement curvature and velocity. Human motion perception seems to reflect this constraint. The functional MRI study reported here demonstrates that the brain's response to this law of motion is much stronger and more widespread than to other types of motion. Compliance with this law is reflected in the activation of a large network of brain areas subserving motor production, visual motion processing, and action observation functions. Hence, these results strongly support the notion of similar neural coding for motion perception and production. These findings suggest that cortical motion representations are optimally tuned to the kinematic and geometrical invariants characterizing biological actions.functional MRI ͉ motion perception ͉ movement kinematics ͉ trajectory formation ͉ two-thirds power law H umans can easily perceive and infer emotions and intentions from the movements and actions of other individuals. The perceptual saliency of human movement might be rooted in the close interactions between perception and action (1, 2). Moreover, movements of humans, primates, and possibly also other animals show certain geometric and kinematic regularities, indicating they are governed by a relatively small number of rules, the so-called kinematic laws of motion. These laws of motion were discovered through recording, kinematic analysis, and modeling of the geometrical and temporal features of the hand paths and velocity profiles characterizing these movements. For example, point-topoint reaching movements tend to follow straight hand paths and to have bell-shaped velocity profiles (3). The velocity profiles during curved and handwriting movements are more complicated. As already noted by early investigations, when following a curvilinear trajectory, hand velocity exhibits a strong dependency on the geometrical form of the path.

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Seeing biological motion

Cited by 290 publications

References 17 publications

Biologically Plausible Neural Model for the Recognition of Biological Motion and Actions

Biologically Plausible Neural Model for the Recognition of Biological Motion and Actions

Perception of biological motion without local image motion

Neural representations of kinematic laws of motion: Evidence for action-perception coupling

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