title: Human biological and nonbiological point-light movements: Creation and validation of the dataset.
abstract: Human action perception is so powerful that people can identify movement efficiently in the absence of pictorial information, such as in point-light displays. Interest is growing in this type of stimulus for research in neuroscience. This interest stems from the advantage of separating the component of pure human action kinematics from other pictorial information, such as facial expression and muscle contraction. Although several groups have previously developed datasets of human point-light actions, due to the lack of datasets composed of daily actions with short durations, we developed 20 biological and 40 control (scrambled) point-light movements by using the technique of recording people wearing reflector patches. The videos are about 1 s long. Subsequently, we performed a judgment task in which 100 participants (50 male and 50 female) evaluated each video according to three categories: human action resemblance, performed action, and gender of actor. We present the mean scores of each evaluation for each video, and further propose a selection of the most suitable videos to be used as human point-light action displays and scrambled point-light displays for control. Finally, we discuss our findings on the gender attributions of the point-light displays.
authors.affiliation: Social and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory and Developmental Disorders Program, Center for Healthy and Biological Sciences, Mackenzie Presbyterian University, Rua Piaui, 181, 10th floor, Consolação, 01241-001, Sao Paulo, SP, Brazil.
authors.forename: Olivia Morgan
authors.initials: OM
authors.lastname: Lapenta
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Movement Sciences, Center for Healthy and Biological Sciences, Mackenzie Presbyterian University, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
authors.forename: Ana Paula
authors.initials: AP
authors.lastname: Xavier
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Movement Sciences, Center for Healthy and Biological Sciences, Mackenzie Presbyterian University, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
authors.forename: Sônia Cavalcanti
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Côrrea
authors.affiliation: Social and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory and Developmental Disorders Program, Center for Healthy and Biological Sciences, Mackenzie Presbyterian University, Rua Piaui, 181, 10th floor, Consolação, 01241-001, Sao Paulo, SP, Brazil. boggio@mackenzie.br.
authors.forename: Paulo Sérgio
authors.initials: PS
authors.lastname: Boggio
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D066264:Datasets as Topic; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception; D009068:Movement; D014741:Video Recording; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Action perception; Human movement; Point-light; Scrambled movement; Video database