Turning configural processing upside down: Part and whole body postures.

Abstract

Like faces, body postures are susceptible to an inversion effect in untrained viewers. The inversion effect may be indicative of configural processing, but what kind of configural processing is used for the recognition of body postures must be specified. The information available in the body stimulus was manipulated. The presence and magnitude of inversion effects were compared for body parts, scrambled bodies, and body halves relative to whole bodies and to corresponding conditions for faces and houses. Results suggest that configural body posture recognition relies on the structural hierarchy of body parts, not the parts themselves or a complete template match. Configural recognition of body postures based on information about the structural hierarchy of parts defines an important point on the configural processing continuum, between recognition based on first-order spatial relations and recognition based on holistic undifferentiated template matching.

Mental Imagery for Full and Upper Human Bodies: Common Right Hemisphere Activations and Distinct Extrastriate Activations

“…Whereas the right FFA was activated during the presentation of upper bodies independent of the task, the left EBA coded for mental transformation only when full bodies were employed. These data corroborate and extend behavioural data (Reed et al 2006) and clinical data (Blanke et al 2004; suggesting the presence of similar and distinct mechanisms in the processing of two important social stimuli-full and upper human bodies.…”

“…First, body stimuli in previous studies were generally presented as a single left or right arm or hand, whereas studies on mental imagery of full human bodies used bilateral body stimuli. Using bilateral stimuli of the upper part of the human body (Reed et al 2006) would allow comparison with mental imagery of bilateral stimuli of the full body. Second, our study was motivated by differences in neural coding for upper and full human bodies as suggested by clinical evidence from neurological patients with illusory own body perceptions such as autoscopic hallucinations and out-of-body experiences Blanke and Metzinger 2009).…”

Illusory self-identification with an avatar reduces arousal responses to painful stimuli

“…This result was further qualified by the second experiment, where another control condition was added, consisting of a scrambled human figure, typically used in studies testing body and face perception [47][48][49]. The specific aim of Experiment 2 was to assess the importance of a realistic body configuration [48] for inducing the FBI and the reduction in the SCR to painful stimuli.…”

Evidence for distinct contributions of form and motion information to the recognition of emotions from body gestures

“…If inversion impairs the processing of static form and form-from-motion cues (perhaps by changing the hierarchy of the body parts - Reed et al, 2006) more than it does the processing of kinematic and dynamic cues, then we should find that stimulus inversion more severely impairs emotion recognition accuracy from patch-light gestures than from full-light gestures. Similarly, if motion reversal impairs the processing of changes in form over time more than it does the processing of kinematic and dynamic cues, then we should find that reversing the direction of play more severely impairs emotion recognition accuracy from the patch-light than from the fulllight stimuli.…”

“…The disproportionate disruption to the perception of faces compared to other objects engendered by stimulus inversion (reviewed in Peterson & Rhodes, 2003) is also evident in the perception of body postures (Reed, Stone, Bozova, & Tanaka, 2003;Reed, Stone, Grubb, & McGoldrick, 2006;Stekelenburg & de Gelder, 2004) and movement. The spontaneous identification of point-light motion displays as biological motion is impaired when they are shown upside down (Bertenthal & Pinto, 1994;Pavlova & Sokolov, 2000;Shipley, 2003;Troje, 2003), even given prior knowledge about display orientation (Pavlova & Sokolov, 2003).…”