title: The relative importance of spatial versus temporal structure in the perception of biological motion: an event-related potential study.
abstract: We investigated how the spatiotemporal structure of animations of biological motion (BM) affects brain activity. We measured event-related potentials (ERPs) during the perception of BM under four conditions: normal spatial and temporal structure; scrambled spatial and normal temporal structure; normal spatial and scrambled temporal structure; and scrambled spatial and temporal structure. As in a previous study, we identified two negative components at both occipitotemporal regions: N210 reflected general motion processing while N280 reflected the processing of BM. We analyzed the averaged ERPs in the 200-300 ms response time window and found that spatial structure had a substantial effect on the magnitude of the averaged response amplitude in both hemispheres. This finding suggests that spatial structure of point-lights elicits a stronger response in the occipitotemporal region than temporal structure for the BM perception.
authors.affiliation: Course of General Systems Studies, Department of Multi-disciplinary Sciences, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Meguro-ku, Japan. hirai@ardbeg.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp
authors.forename: Masahiro
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hirai
authors.forename: Kazuo
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Hiraki
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D009778:Occipital Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology; D013702:Temporal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D014795:Visual Pathways