Biological movement

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Biological movement is a term from experimental psychology and psychophysics . This indicates a category of visual (or also audible ) stimuli that are typically used in experiments to research the fundamentals of perception, to make a diagnosis , or to demonstrate extraordinary performance of perception. “Biological movement” can be defined as the perceptible, active locomotion of living beings, in particular the visual representation of human movement. "Biological movement" is also often used as an abbreviation for so-called light point biological movement. With such movement patterns , only a few moving points are visible on a homogeneous background (typically 10–20). These points are usually placed on the joints and distal ends of the body extremities (demo:).

prehistory

The term "biological movement" was introduced in 1973 by the Swedish experimental psychologist Gunnar Johansson in the context of the so-called light point walkers. Up until then, Johansson was working on the development of Gestalt laws for the perception of small groups of white dots on a black background. In doing so he found laws for expansion, translation, rotation and pendulum movements. In order to test his findings for natural movements, he developed video methods to depict human movement in points of light. Johansson mounted lamps in people's joints and then filmed them as they moved around in the dark. With this he had developed a stimulus that was largely detached from image and form information. His astonishing finding was that people can perceive biological movement, despite greatly reduced cues, much better than expected based on the gestalt laws. This finding was further substantiated in the late 1970s and 1980s. For example, gender differences, moods or the identity of a person can be recognized using the light point runner.

Mechanism of perception

Although the term “biological movement” suggests that it is a kind of visual movement perception, Johansson's embedding at the level of the laws of gestalt already indicates that there are no typical processing mechanisms of visual movement. It was recognized early on that lesion patients who have difficulty recognizing movement can still recognize biological movement very well using the light point runner. While patients who have difficulty recognizing objects also have difficulty recognizing biological movement using the light point walker. These findings were confirmed in healthy individuals.

Neural Mechanism

Electrophysiological studies on macaques showed that certain cells in the secondary auditory cortex , the superior temporal sulcus , respond specifically to the light point runner stimulus. Similar findings were made in the premotor cortex of macaques in the 1990s . The latter neurons were, amazingly, neurons with a motor function, and therefore they were called mirror neurons .

See also

swell

  1. ↑ biomotion demo
  2. ^ Gunnar Johansson: Visual perception of biological motion and a model for its analysis . In: Percept. Psychophys . 14, 1973, pp. 201-211.
  3. ^ Cutting, JE, Moore, C. & Morrison, R .: Masking the motions of human gait . In: Percept. Psychophys . 44, 1988, pp. 339-347.
  4. ^ Mather, G. & Murdoch, L .: Gender discrimination in biological motion displays based on dynamic cues . In: Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B . 258 (1353), 1994, pp. 273-279.
  5. ^ Clarke, TJ, Bradshaw, MFField, DT, Hampson, SE & Rose, D .: The perception of emotion from body movement in point-light displays of interpersonal dialogue . In: Perception . 34, 2005, pp. 1171-1180.
  6. ^ Troje, NF, Westhoff, C. & Lavrov, M .: Person identification from biological motion . In: Perception & Psychophysics . 67 (4), 2005, pp. 667-675.
  7. ↑ Vaina, LM, Lemay, M., Bienfang, DC, Choi, AY & Nakayama, K .: Intact biological motion and structure from motion perception in a patient with impaired motion mechanisms: A case study . In: Vis. Neurosci . 5: 353-369, 1990.
  8. ↑ McLeod, P., Dittrich, W., Driver, J., Perrett, D. & Zihl, J .: Preserved and impaired detection of structure from motion by a “motion-blind” patient . In: Vis. Cogn . 3 (4), 1996, pp. 363-391.
  9. ↑ Beintema, JA & Lappe, M .: Perception of biological motion without local image motion . In: Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA . 99, 2002, pp. 5661-5663.
  10. ↑ Oram, MW & Perrett, DI: Responses of anterior superior temporal polysensory area (STPa) neurons to “biological motion” stimuli . In: J. Cogn. Neurosci . 6, 1994, pp. 99-116.
  11. ^ Gallese, V., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L. & Rizzolatti, G .: Action recognition in the premotor cortex . In: Brain . 119, 1996, pp. 593-609.
  12. ^ Rizzolatti, G. & Craighero, L .: The mirror-neuron system . In: Annu. Rev. Neurosci. . 27, 2004, pp. 169-197.