Senra Catarina Carvalho, Sampaio Adriana Conceição Soares, Lapenta Olivia Morgan
Psychological Neuroscience Laboratory, Psychology Research Center, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Rua da Universidade, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal.
NeuroSci. 2025 Jan 2;6(1):2. doi: 10.3390/neurosci6010002.
Human point-light displays consist of luminous dots representing human articulations, thus depicting actions without pictorial information. These stimuli are widely used in action recognition experiments. Because humans excel in decoding human motion, point-light displays (PLDs) are often masked with additional moving dots (noise masks), thereby challenging stimulus recognition. These noise masks are typically found within proprietary programming software, entail file format restrictions, and demand extensive programming skills. To address these limitations, we present the first user-friendly step-by-step guide to develop visual noise to mask PLDs using free, open-source software that offers compatibility with various file formats, features a graphical interface, and facilitates the manipulation of both 2D and 3D videos. Further, to validate our approach, we tested two generated masks in a pilot experiment with 12 subjects and demonstrated that they effectively jeopardised human agent recognition and, therefore, action visibility. In sum, the main advantages of the presented methodology are its cost-effectiveness and ease of use, making it appealing to novices in programming. This advancement holds the potential to stimulate young researchers' use of PLDs, fostering further exploration and understanding of human motion perception.
人体点光显示由代表人体关节的发光点组成，因此在没有图像信息的情况下描绘动作。这些刺激物在动作识别实验中被广泛使用。由于人类擅长解码人体运动，点光显示（PLD）通常会被额外的移动点（噪声掩码）掩盖，从而对刺激识别构成挑战。这些噪声掩码通常存在于专有编程软件中，存在文件格式限制，并且需要广泛的编程技能。为了解决这些限制，我们提供了第一份用户友好的分步指南，介绍如何使用免费的开源软件开发视觉噪声来掩盖PLD，该软件与各种文件格式兼容，具有图形界面，并便于对2D和3D视频进行操作。此外，为了验证我们的方法，我们在一项有12名受试者的试点实验中测试了两个生成的掩码，并证明它们有效地破坏了人体识别，从而影响了动作可见性。总之，所提出方法的主要优点是其成本效益和易用性，这使其对编程新手具有吸引力。这一进展有可能刺激年轻研究人员使用PLD，促进对人体运动感知的进一步探索和理解。
