Hiris Eric
Department of Psychology, St. Mary's College of Maryland, St. Mary's City, MD, USA.
J Vis. 2007 Sep 18;7(12):4.1-16. doi: 10.1167/7.12.4.
Often it is claimed that humans are particularly sensitive to biological motion. Here, sensitivity as a detection advantage for biological over nonbiological motion is examined. Previous studies comparing biological motion to nonbiological motion have not used appropriate masks or have not taken into account the underlying form present in biological motion. The studies reported here compare the detection of biological motion to nonbiological motion with and without form. Target animation sequences represented a walking human, an unstructured translation and rotation, and a structured translation and rotation. Both the number of mask dots and the size of the target varied across trials. The results show that biological motion is easier to detect than unstructured nonbiological motion but is not easier to detect than structured nonbiological motion. The results cannot be explained by learning over the course of data collection. Additional analyses show that mask density explains masking of different size target areas and is not specific to detection tasks. These data show that humans are not better at detecting biological motion compared to nonbiological motion in a mask. Any differences in detection performance between biological motion and nonbiological motion may be in part because biological motion always contains an underlying form.
人们常称人类对生物运动特别敏感。在此，我们考察了作为生物运动相对于非生物运动的检测优势的敏感性。以往将生物运动与非生物运动进行比较的研究，要么没有使用合适的掩蔽，要么没有考虑生物运动中存在的潜在形式。本文所报告的研究将有形式和无形式的生物运动与非生物运动的检测进行了比较。目标动画序列展示了一个行走的人、无结构的平移和旋转，以及有结构的平移和旋转。每次试验中掩蔽点的数量和目标的大小都会变化。结果表明，生物运动比无结构的非生物运动更容易检测，但并不比有结构的非生物运动更容易检测。结果无法用数据收集过程中的学习来解释。进一步的分析表明，掩蔽密度解释了不同大小目标区域的掩蔽情况，且并非特定于检测任务。这些数据表明，在有掩蔽的情况下，与非生物运动相比，人类在检测生物运动方面并不更出色。生物运动和非生物运动在检测性能上的任何差异，可能部分是因为生物运动总是包含一种潜在形式。
