Abstract
Recent work suggests that biological motion processing can begin within ~110 ms of stimulus onset, as indexed by the P1 component of the event-related potential (ERP). Here, we investigated whether modulation of the P1 component reflects configural processing alone, rather than the processing of both configuration and motion cues. A three-stimulus oddball task was employed to evaluate bottom-up processing of biological motion. Intact point-light walkers (PLWs) or scrambled PLWs served as distractor stimuli, whereas point-light displays of tool motion served as standard and target stimuli. In a second experiment, the same design was used, but the dynamic stimuli were replaced with static point-light displays. The first experiment revealed that dynamic PLWs elicited a larger P1 as compared to scrambled PLWs. A similar P1 increase was also observed for static PLWs in the second experiment, indicating that these stimuli were more salient than static, scrambled PLWs. These findings suggest that the visual system can rapidly extract global form information from static PLWs and that the observed P1 effect for dynamic PLWs is not dependent on the presence of motion cues. Finally, we found that the N1 component was sensitive to dynamic, but not static, PLWs, suggesting that this component reflects the processing of both form and motion information. The sensitivity of P1 to static PLWs has implications for dynamic form models of biological motion processing that posit temporal integration of configural cues present in individual frames of PLW animations.
Highlights
Humans are able to perceive the actions of others with relative ease, even when their movements are reduced only to points of light [1]
There is some evidence from event-related potential (ERP) studies that the processing of human biological motion begins in the latency range of the occipital-temporal N1 component [7,8], which peaks approximately 170-210 ms following stimulus onset
Post-hoc analyses (Bonferroni correction; alpha = .05/3 = .017) revealed that the interaction was due to a right lateralized increase in amplitude elicited by intact point-light walkers (PLWs) (t(1,11) = 2.96; p = .013) (Figure 2a)
Summary
Humans are able to perceive the actions of others with relative ease, even when their movements are reduced only to points of light [1]. There is some evidence from event-related potential (ERP) studies that the processing of human biological motion begins in the latency range of the occipital-temporal N1 component [7,8], which peaks approximately 170-210 ms following stimulus onset. Such activity has been suggested to reflect the integration of form and motion information, allowing for the generation of coherent biological motion percepts [9]. Such a P1 modulation is consistent with MEG work by Pavlova and colleagues [12,13] showing increased parietal gamma responses at approximately 120-130 ms after stimulus onset
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