Movies, motion and emotion: brain function underlying perception of dynamic stimuli A Bartels |
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Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN), Vision & Cognition Lab, University of Tübingen, Germany
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| Not all art is static, some of it is designed to be explored through self- or object motion, such as sculptures, installations and movies. Our key interest lies in understanding high-level processing of visual motion. Even though we are not explicitly studying art, our interest led us to study cinematic movies and motion-illusions that may count as modern forms of art. Using these stimuli, or controlled stimuli that were inspired from them, allowed us to gain fundamental insights in neural mechanisms related to processing dynamic visual stimuli. Our brains are experts in processing dynamic visual input: we rarely ever sit still or stop moving our eyes, and even if we did, there is enough motion in our environment to keep the signals reaching our retinae changing. Despite decades of research on visual motion processing, surprisingly little is known about processes that allow us to perceive the world as stable, and to segregate self-induced motion from external motion. Cinematic films however use and rely on simulated self-motion to put us right into the role of an active observer on site. In my talk I will present several studies from our lab that shed some light on neural substrates involved in solving the self- vs. external motion problem that we addressed using feature movies and controlled visual stimuli. Since self-motion leads to spatial self-displacement, we complemented our motion studies with ones looking at the representation of ego-centric space in the brain that I will briefly touch on. I will also show evidence on mechanisms helping us to use motion cues to ‘bind’ and recognize global Gestalt from local cues, using a beautiful illusion, and present new evidence on how distinct aspects of face-motion are extracted in distinct face-processing regions to extract emotional meaning from motion. If time permits, I may digress briefly to discuss the relationship between motion and color in both perception and neural integration. This will be a neuroscience talk – but hopefully nevertheless relevant to artists, as most fundamental insights into the visual brain are relevant for artists, just as most relevant visual art provides insights into vision. |
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