Riddell Hugh, Tolentino-Castro J Walter, Wagner Heiko, Lappe Markus
University of Münster, Germany.
Perception. 2017 Nov;46(11):1283-1297. doi: 10.1177/0301006617718716. Epub 2017 Jul 4.
Down syndrome (DS) is one of the most common chromosomal disorders and is often associated with a number of motor and cognitive impairments. Little research has been dedicated to investigating the perceptual abilities of individuals with DS. The visual processing of biological motion has been shown to be impaired in DS. It has been proposed that these impairments may stem from an inability to process the global patterns of full-body motion produced by a moving actor; however, this has not been explicitly investigated. We tested groups of participants with and without DS on a task requiring the visual discrimination of point-light walkers from spatially scrambled versions of point-light walkers. Participants with DS demonstrated poorer performance and slower reaction times on the task than healthy controls. From these results, we conclude that biological motion processing is impaired in DS and that this deficit is related to an inability to integrate global configural cues. In a second experiment, individuals with DS were able to discriminate the direction in which laterally translating walkers moved, suggesting that the global motion processing deficit observed in Experiment 1 is specific to biological motion recognition and does not generalise to other types of global motion.
唐氏综合征（DS）是最常见的染色体疾病之一，常与多种运动和认知障碍相关。很少有研究致力于调查唐氏综合征患者的感知能力。研究表明，唐氏综合征患者在生物运动的视觉处理方面存在障碍。有人提出，这些障碍可能源于无法处理移动演员产生的全身运动的整体模式；然而，这一点尚未得到明确研究。我们对患有和未患有唐氏综合征的参与者组进行了一项任务测试，该任务要求从点光源行走者的空间打乱版本中视觉辨别点光源行走者。与健康对照组相比，唐氏综合征患者在该任务上表现更差，反应时间更长。从这些结果中，我们得出结论，唐氏综合征患者的生物运动处理存在障碍，且这种缺陷与无法整合整体构型线索有关。在第二个实验中，唐氏综合征患者能够辨别横向平移的行走者的移动方向，这表明在实验1中观察到的整体运动处理缺陷是生物运动识别所特有的，不会推广到其他类型的整体运动。
