The detection of biological motion and the detection of emotion from this motion are important visual functions with obvious survival and social values. The perception of biological motion is remarkably robust, and numerous studies have shown that the emotional states of a person can be deduced from point-light biological motion. In the present study, we investigated the extent to which the detection of emotion from biological motion is linked to the explicit detection of human gait. Subjects performed gait detection and emotion detection for the same stimulus. The stimulus consisted of one coherent interval and one scrambled biological-motion interval, each of which contained one emotionally neutral and one emotional (angry or happy) walker. Significant correlations with gait detection performance were observed for anger detection but not necessarily for happiness detection, implying that the detection of anger may be more strongly linked to explicit gait detection. This leads to a hypothesis that differential dependence may reflect the differential behavioural meaning between anger and happiness detection; it may be more crucial to localise or identify a person with anger than happiness.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
AhlstromVBlakeRAhlstromU, 1997“Perception of biological motion”Perception261539–1548.
2.
AtkinsonA PDittrichW HGemmellA JYoungA W, 2004“Emotion perception from dynamic and static body expressions in point-light and full-light displays”Perception33717–746.
3.
BarclayC DCuttingJ EKozlowskiL T, 1978“Temporal and spatial factors in gait perception that influence gender recognition”Perception & Psychophysics23145–152.
4.
BeardsworthTBucknerT, 1981“The ability to recognize oneself from a video recording of one's movements without seeing one's body”Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society1819–22.
5.
BeintemaJ ALappeM, 2002“Perception of biological motion without local image motion”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA995661–5663.
6.
BertenthalB IPintoJ, 1994“Global processing of biological motions”Psychological Science5221–225.
7.
BlakeRShiffrarM, 2007“Perception of human motion”Annual Review of Psychology5847–73.
BruceVYoungA, 1986“Understanding face recognition”British Journal of Psychology77305–327.
10.
CalderA. J.YoungA W, 2005“Understanding the recognition of facial identity and facial expression”Nature Reviews Neuroscience6641–651.
11.
CalvoM GAveroPLundqvistD, 2006“Facilitated detection of angry faces: Initial orienting and processing efficiency”Cognition & Emotion20785–811.
12.
ChouchourelouAMatsukaTHarberKShiffrarM, 2006“The visual analysis of emotional actions”Social Neuroscience163–74.
13.
ClarkeT JBradshawM FFieldD THampsonS ERoseD, 2005“The perception of emotion from body movement in point-light displays of interpersonal dialogue”Perception341171–1180.
14.
CuttingJ E, 1978“Generation of synthetic male and female walkers through manipulation of a biomechanical invariant”Perception7393–405.
15.
CuttingJ EKozlowskiL T, 1977“Recognizing friends by their walk: Gait perception without familiarity cues”Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society9353–356.
16.
CuttingJ EMooreCMorrisonR, 1988“Masking the motions of human gait”Perception & Psychophysics44339–347.
17.
CuttingJ EProffittD RKozlowskiL T, 1978“A biomechanical invariant for gait perception”Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance4357–372.
18.
DavisJ WGaoH, 2004“An expressive three-mode principal components model for gender recognition”Journal of Vision4362–377.
19.
DittrichW H, 1993“Action categories and the perception of biological motion”Perception2215–22.
20.
DittrichW HTrosciankoTLeaS E GMorganD, 1996“Perception of emotion from dynamic point-light displays represented in dance”Perception25727–738.
21.
EastwoodJ DSmilekDMerikleP M, 2001“Differential attentional guidance by unattended faces expressing positive and negative emotion”Perception & Psychophysics631004–1013.
22.
FoxELesterVRussoRBowlesR JPichlerADuttonK, 2000“Facial expressions of emotion: Are angry faces detected more efficiently?”Cognition & Emotion1461–92.
23.
GanelTGoshen-GottsteinY, 2004“Effects of familiarity on the perceptual integrality of the identity and expression of faces: The parallel-route hypothesis revisited”Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance30583–599.
24.
GieseM APoggioT, 2003“Neural mechanisms for the recognition of biological movements”Nature Reviews Neuroscience4179–192.
25.
GrosbrasM HPausT, 2006“Brain networks involved in viewing angry hands or faces”Cerebral Cortex161087–1096.
26.
GrossmanE DBlakeRKimC Y, 2004“Learning to see biological motion: Brain activity parallels behavior”Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience161669–1679.
27.
HansenC HHansenR D, 1988“Finding the face in the crowd an anger superiority effect”Journal of Personality and Social Psychology54917–924.
28.
HaxbyJ VHoffmanE AGobbiniM I, 2000“The distributed human neural system for face perception”Trends in Cognitive Sciences4223–233.
29.
HillHJohnstonA, 2001“Categorizing sex and identity from the biological motion of faces”Current Biology11880–885.
30.
HillHPollickF E, 2000“Exaggerating temporal differences enhances recognition of individuals from point-light displays”Psychological Science11223–228.
31.
IkedaHBlakeRWatanabeK, 2005“Eccentric perception of biological motion is unscalably poor”Vision Research451935–1943.
32.
JohanssonG, 1973“Visual perception of biological motion and a model for its analysis”Perception & Psychophysics14201–202.
33.
KozlowskiL TCuttingJ E, 1977“Recognizing the sex of a walker from dynamic point-light display”Perception & Psychophysics21575–580.
34.
MaYPatersonH MPollickF E, 2006“A motion capture library for the study of identity, gender, and emotion perception from biological motion”Behavior Research Methods38134–141.
35.
MatherGMurdochL, 1994“Gender discrimination in biological motion displays based on dynamic cues”Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B258273–279.
36.
MatherGRadfordKWestS, 1992“Low-level visual processing of biological motion”Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B249149–155.
ÖhmanALundqvistDEstevesF, 2001“The face in the crowd revisited: A threat advantage with schematic stimuli”Journal of Personality and Social Psychology80381–396.
39.
PelliD G, 1997“The Video Toolbox software for visual psychophysics: Transforming numbers into movies”Spatial Vision10437–442.
40.
PintoJShiffrarM, 1999“Subconfigurations of the human form in the perception of biological motion displays”Acta Psychologica102293–318.
41.
PollickF ELestouVRyuJChoS B, 2002“Estimating the efficiency of recognizing gender and affect from biological motion”Vision Research422345–2355.
42.
PollickF EPatersonH MBruderlinASanfordA J, 2001“Perceiving affect from arm movement”Cognition82B51–B61.
43.
SchweinbergerS RBurtonA MKellyS W, 1999“Asymmetric dependencies in perceiving identity and emotion: Experiments with morphed faces”Perception & Psychophysics611102–1115.
44.
ThorntonI MPintoJShiffrarM, 1998“The visual perception of human locomotion”Cognitive Neuropsychology15535–552.
45.
TrojeN F, 2002“Decomposing biological motion: A framework for analysis and synthesis of human gait patterns”Journal of Vision2371–387.
46.
VerfaillieK, 2000“Perceiving human locomotion: Priming effects in direction discrimination”Brain and Cognition44192–213.
