Our ability to accurately perceive the actions of others based on reduced visual cues has been well documented. Previous work has suggested that this ability is probably made possible by separable mechanisms that can operate in either a passive, bottom-up fashion or an active, top-down fashion (Thornton, Rensink, & Shiffrar, 2002 Perception 31 837–853). One line of evidence for exploring the contribution of top-down mechanisms is to consider the extent to which individual differences in more general cognitive abilities, such as attention and working memory, predict performance on biological motion tasks. In this talk, I will begin by reviewing previous work that has looked at biological motion processing in clinical settings and as a function of domain-specific expertise. I will then introduce a new task that we are using in my lab to explore individual variation in action matching as a function of independently assessed attentional control and working memory capacity.
