Motion coherence and biological motion perception K S Pilz |
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School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom
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| Sensitivity to coherent motion is often contrasted with performance in biological motion and global form tasks to assess differences in motion and form processing, which are related to the dorsal and ventral visual streams, respectively. Here, we used point-light walkers to investigate how the perception of local motion and form information in biological motion stimuli is related to sensitivity to coherent motion, which up to now has been relatively unexplored. We asked participants to perform a biological motion direction discrimination task for normal walkers that contain both local motion and global form information, scrambled walkers that primarily contain local motion information and random-position walkers that primarily contain global form information. We determined motion coherence thresholds for each observer and correlated performance for point-light walker discrimination with individual motion coherence thresholds. High sensitivity to coherent motion correlated with increased performance for normal, and, to a lesser extent, also with random-position point-light walkers. Interestingly, there was no correlation between performance for scrambled walkers and sensitivity to coherent motion. These results support the hypothesis that sensitivity to motion coherence is not necessarily confined to dorsal stream functioning. |
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