Are Mechanisms for Perception of Biological Motion Different from Mechanisms for Perception of Nonbiological Motion?

We compared the integration of information over space and time for perceiving different configurations of moving dots: a walking person (biological motion), rigid three-dimensional shapes, and unidirectional coherent motion of all dots (translation). No performance differences in judging walking direction and coherent translation direction were obtained in conditions with constant presentation times and varying number of target dots (integration over space). Depending on the speed of the two-dimensional configurations judgments were either worse or better than the judgments of walking direction. The results for conditions with different presentation times (integration over time) show that information about biological motion is integrated over time that increases with increasing gait period, while two-dimensional unidirectional motion is integrated over constant time independent of speed. The effect is not due to the oscillatory nature of the biological motion since information about a rigid three-dimensional shape is summed over a constant time independent of the period of the motion cycle. This could be interpreted as different neural mechanisms mediating the temporal summation for walking direction compared to detecting the orientation of rigid structure, or the direction of two-dimensional unidirectional motion. Since biological motion is characterized by nonrigidity, it is possible that the form itself is integrated over time and not the motion pattern.