Abstract
The successful detection of biological motion can have important consequences for survival. Previous studies have demonstrated the ease and speed with which observers can extract a wide range of information from impoverished dynamic displays in which only an actor's joints are visible [1–2]. Although it has often been suggested that such biological motion processing can be accomplished relatively automatically [1–5], few studies have directly tested this assumption by using behavioral methods. Here we used a flanker paradigm [6–8] to assess how peripheral “to-be-ignored” walkers affect the processing of a central target walker. Our results suggest that task-irrelevant dynamic figures cannot be ignored and are processed to a level where they influence behavior. These findings provide the first direct evidence that complex dynamic patterns can be processed incidentally, a finding that may have important implications for cognitive, neurophysiological, and computational models of biological motion processing.
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