Lisboa Isabel C, Basso Daniel M, Santos Jorge A, Pereira Alfredo F
Psychology Research Centre (CiPsi), School of Psychology, Campus de Gualtar, University of Minho, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal.
Algoritmi Research Centre, School of Engineering, Campus de Azurém, University of Minho, 4800-058 Guimarães, Portugal.
Brain Sci. 2022 Apr 27;12(5):566. doi: 10.3390/brainsci12050566.
To perceive, identify and understand the action of others, it is essential to perceptually organize individual and local moving body parts (such as limbs) into the whole configuration of a human body in action. Configural processing-processing the relations among features or parts of a stimulus-is a fundamental ability in the perception of several important social stimuli, such as faces or biological motion. Despite this, we know very little about how human infants develop the ability to perceive and prefer configural relations in biological motion. We present two preferential looking experiments (one cross-sectional and one longitudinal) measuring infants' preferential attention between a coherent motion configuration of a person walking vs. a scrambled point-light walker (i.e., a stimulus in which all configural relations were removed, thus, in which the perception of a person is impossible). We found that three-month-old infants prefer a coherent point-light walker in relation to a scrambled display, but both five- and seven-month-old infants do not show any preference. We discuss our findings in terms of the different perceptual, attentional, motor, and brain processes available at each age group, and how they dynamically interact with selective attention toward the coherent and socially relevant motion of a person walking during our first year of life.
为了感知、识别和理解他人的行为，至关重要的是要在感知上把单个的、局部的运动身体部位（如四肢）组织成一个正在行动的人体的整体形态。构型加工——处理刺激的特征或部分之间的关系——是感知几种重要社会刺激（如面孔或生物运动）的一项基本能力。尽管如此，我们对人类婴儿如何发展出感知并偏好生物运动中的构型关系的能力知之甚少。我们进行了两项优先注视实验（一项横断面实验和一项纵向实验），测量婴儿在一个行走的人的连贯运动构型与一个点光行走者打乱后的刺激（即一种去除了所有构型关系、因而无法感知到人的刺激）之间的优先注意力。我们发现，三个月大的婴儿相对于打乱后的展示更喜欢连贯的点光行走者，但五个月和七个月大的婴儿都没有表现出任何偏好。我们根据每个年龄组可用的不同感知、注意力、运动和大脑过程，以及在我们生命的第一年中它们如何与对一个人行走的连贯且与社会相关的运动的选择性注意力动态相互作用来讨论我们的发现。
