Department of Psychology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2012;7(5):e37085. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0037085. Epub 2012 May 23.
The ability to find and evade fighting persons in a crowd is potentially life-saving. To investigate how the visual system processes threatening actions, we employed a visual search paradigm with threatening boxer targets among emotionally-neutral walker distractors, and vice versa. We found that a boxer popped out for both intact and scrambled actions, whereas walkers did not. A reverse correlation analysis revealed that observers' responses clustered around the time of the "punch", a signature movement of boxing actions, but not around specific movements of the walker. These findings support the existence of a detector for signature movements in action perception. This detector helps in rapidly detecting aggressive behavior in a crowd, potentially through an expedited (sub)cortical threat-detection mechanism.
在人群中发现并躲避战斗人员可能会挽救生命。为了研究视觉系统如何处理威胁行为，我们采用了一种视觉搜索范式，其中威胁性的拳击手目标与情绪中性的步行者干扰物混合在一起，反之亦然。我们发现，拳击手在完整和打乱的动作中都很突出，而步行者则不然。反向相关分析显示，观察者的反应集中在“出拳”的时间，这是拳击动作的标志性动作，但不是步行者的特定动作。这些发现支持在动作感知中存在用于识别标志性动作的探测器的存在。这个探测器有助于通过快速的（亚）皮质威胁检测机制，在人群中快速发现攻击行为。
