Title: Perception of biological motion as motion-from-form
Abstract:Abstract The recognition of the movements and actions of others is of great importance for social interaction. The visual motion pattern projected on the retina when watching somebody else act is ca...Abstract The recognition of the movements and actions of others is of great importance for social interaction. The visual motion pattern projected on the retina when watching somebody else act is called biological motion. Because of the many degrees of freedom of the body, biological motion is a relatively complicated motion pattern, much more variable, for example, than optic flow or object motion. The regularities of biological motion are contained in its relationship to the body, i.e. in the constraints imposed by the articulation of the limbs on the movement of the body parts. The neural mechanisms of biological motion perception, therefore, take body form information into account. I describe a model of biological motion perception that starts from a representation of body form and posture and retrieves biological motion as the transformation of the body posture over time. Essentially, this proposes a ventral pathway to motion perception that is distinct from the other motion pathways in the dorsal stream, and specialized for body motion.Read More