State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Br J Psychol. 2024 Feb;115(1):115-128. doi: 10.1111/bjop.12680. Epub 2023 Aug 25.
Walking direction conveyed by biological motion (BM) cues, which humans are highly sensitive to since birth, can elicit involuntary shifts of attention to enhance the detection of static targets. Here, we demonstrated that such intrinsic sensitivity to walking direction could also modulate the direction perception of simultaneously presented dynamic stimuli. We showed that the perceived direction of apparent motion was biased towards the walking direction even though observers had been informed in advance that the walking direction of BM did not predict the apparent motion direction. In particular, rightward BM cues had an advantage over leftward BM cues in altering the perception of motion direction. Intriguingly, this perceptual bias disappeared when BM cues were shown inverted, or when the critical biological characteristics were removed from the cues. Critically, both the perceptual direction bias and the rightward advantage persisted even when only local BM cues were presented without any global configuration. Furthermore, the rightward advantage was found to be specific to social cues (i.e., BM), as it vanished when non-social cues (i.e., arrows) were utilized. Taken together, these findings support the existence of a specific processing mechanism for life motion signals and shed new light on their influences in a dynamic environment.
生物运动（BM）线索所传达的行走方向，人类自出生以来就高度敏感，这会引起注意力的无意识转移，从而增强对静态目标的检测。在这里，我们证明了对行走方向的这种内在敏感性也可以调节同时呈现的动态刺激的方向感知。我们表明，尽管观察者事先被告知 BM 的行走方向不预测表观运动方向，但表观运动的感知方向仍偏向于行走方向。特别是，右侧的 BM 线索在改变运动方向的感知方面比左侧的 BM 线索具有优势。有趣的是，当 BM 线索被倒置或从线索中去除关键的生物特征时，这种感知偏差就会消失。至关重要的是，即使只呈现没有任何全局配置的局部 BM 线索，这种感知方向偏差和右侧优势仍然存在。此外，右侧优势是特定于社会线索（即 BM）的，因为当使用非社会线索（即箭头）时，这种优势就消失了。总之，这些发现支持了生命运动信号存在特定处理机制的观点，并为它们在动态环境中的影响提供了新的认识。
