Experience, context, and the visual perception of human movement.
Why are human observers particularly sensitive to human movement? Seven experiments examined the roles of visual experience and motor processes in human movement perception by comparing visual sensitivities to point-light displays of familiar, unusual, and impossible gaits across gait-speed and identity discrimination tasks. In both tasks, visual sensitivity to physically possible gaits was superior to visual sensitivity to physically impossible gaits, supporting perception-action coupling theories of human movement perception. Visual experience influenced walker-identity perception but not gait-speed discrimination. Thus, both motor experience and visual experience define visual sensitivity to human movement. An ecological perspective can be used to define the conditions necessary for experience-dependent sensitivity to human movement.
Department of Psychology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Newark 07102, USA.
Alissa
A
Jacobs
Jeannine
J
Pinto
Maggie
M
Shiffrar
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D005364:Field Dependence-Independence; D005684:Gait; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception; D009903:Optical Illusions; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D011214:Practice, Psychological; D011601:Psychophysics; D011930:Reaction Time; D012718:Set, Psychology; D012931:Social Environment