Signature movements lead to efficient search for threatening actions.
The ability to find and evade fighting persons in a crowd is potentially life-saving. To investigate how the visual system processes threatening actions, we employed a visual search paradigm with threatening boxer targets among emotionally-neutral walker distractors, and vice versa. We found that a boxer popped out for both intact and scrambled actions, whereas walkers did not. A reverse correlation analysis revealed that observers' responses clustered around the time of the "punch", a signature movement of boxing actions, but not around specific movements of the walker. These findings support the existence of a detector for signature movements in action perception. This detector helps in rapidly detecting aggressive behavior in a crowd, potentially through an expedited (sub)cortical threat-detection mechanism.
Department of Psychology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States of America. j.j.a.vanboxtel@gmail.com
Jeroen J A
JJ
van Boxtel
Hongjing
H
Lu
D001070:Appetitive Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D001914:Boxing; D002140:California; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D016014:Linear Models; D009039:Motion Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D009043:Motor Activity / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D016138:Walking; D055815:Young Adult