Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Letter
  • Published:

Seeing biological motion

Nature volume 395, pages 894–896 (1998)Cite this article

Abstract

One of the more stunning examples of the resourcefulness of human vision is the ability to see ‘biological motion’, which was first shown1 with an adaptation of earlier cinematic work2: illumination of only the joints of a walking person is enough to convey a vivid, compelling impression of human animation, although the percept collapses to a jumble of meaningless lights when the walker stands still. The information is sufficient to discriminate the sex and other details of the walker3,4, and can be interpreted by young infants5. Here we measure the ability of the visual system to integrate this type of motion information over space and time, and compare this capacity with that for viewing simple translational motion. Sensitivity to biological motion increases rapidly with the number of illuminated joints, far more rapidly than for simple motion. Furthermore, this information is summed over extended temporal intervals of up to 3 seconds (eight times longer than for simple motion). The steepness of the summation curves indicates that the mechanisms that analyse biological motion do not integrate linearly over space and time with constant efficiency, as may occur for other forms of complex motion6, but instead adapt to the nature of the stimulus.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: The limited-lifetime technique for studying the ability to see biological motion (upper figures) and translational motion (lower figures), for six-dot sampling (over a two-frame running average).
Figure 2: Sensitivity, expressed as the number of noise dots at threshold, for detection (filled circles) and direction discrimination (open circles), for both simple translation and biological motion.
Figure 3: Sensitivity for direction discrimination, for both translation and biological motion.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Johansson, G. Visual perception of biological motion and a model for its analysis. Percept. Psychoph. 14, 201–211 (1973).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Marey, E.-J. Le Mouvement (Masson, Paris, 1894).

    Google Scholar 

  3. Mather, G. & Murdoch, L. Gender discrimination in biological motion displays based on dynamic cues. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 259, 273–279 (1994).

    ADS  Google Scholar 

  4. Dittrich, W. H., Troscianko, T., Lea, S. & Morgan, D. Perception of emotion from dynamic point-light displays represented in dance. Perception 25, 727–738 (1996).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  5. Fox, R. & McDaniel, C. The perception of biological motion by human infants. Science 218, 486–487 (1982).

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  6. Morrone, M. C., Burr, D. C. & Vaina, L. Two stages of visual processing for radial and circular motion. Nature 376, 507–509 (1995).

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  7. Cutting, J. Aprogram to generate synthetic walkers as dynamic point-light displays. Behav. Res. Methods Instrument 10, 91–94 (1978).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Watson, A. B. Probability summation over time. Vision Res. 19, 515–522 (1979).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  9. Burr, D. C. Temporal summation over moving images by the human visual system. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 211, 321–339 (1981).

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  10. Green, D. M. & Swets, J. A. Signal Detection Theory and Psychophysics (Wiley, New York, 1966).

    Google Scholar 

  11. Maloney, R. K., Mitchison, G. J. & Barlow, H. B. Limit to the detection of Glass patterns in the presence of noise. J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 4, 2336–2341 (1987).

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  12. Wilson, H. R., Wilkinson, F. & Asaad, W. Concentric orientation summation in human form vision. Vision Res. 37, 2325–2330 (1997).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  13. Lappin, J. S. & Bell, H. H. The detection of coherence in moving random-dot patterns. Vision Res. 16, 161–168 (1976).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  14. Barlow, H. B. & Tripathy, S. P. Correspondence noise and signal pooling in the detection of coherent visual motion. J. Neurosci. 17, 7954–7966 (1997).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  15. Burr, D. C., Morrone, M. C. & Vaina, L. Large receptive fields for optic flow direction in humans. Vision Res. 38, 1731–1743 (1998).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  16. Cutting, J. E. Coding theory adapted to gait perception. J. Exp. Psychol. 7, 71–87 (1981).

    Google Scholar 

  17. Marr, D. & Vaina, L. Representation and recognition of the movements of shapes. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 214, 501–524 (1982).

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  18. Ullman, S. in Human and Machine Vision (eds Beck, J., Hope, B. & Rosenfeld, A.) 459–480 (Academic, New York, 1983).

    Book  Google Scholar 

  19. Watson, A. B. & Pelli, D. G. QUEST: A Bayesian adaptive psychometric method. Percept. Psychophys 33, 113–120 (1983).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  20. Mather, G., Radford, K. & West, S. Low-level visual processing of biological motion. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 249, 149–155 (1992).

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank H. Barlow and J. Ross for useful discussions. P.N. was supported by a scholarship from the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa. Supported by MURST and EC BIOMED (VIPROM).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University Laboratory of Physiology, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PT, UK

    Peter Neri

  2. Istituto di Neurofisiologia del CNR, Via S. Zeno 51, Pisa, 56127, Italy

    M. Concetta Morrone & David C. Burr

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Florence, Florence, 50125, Italy

    David C. Burr

Authors
  1. Peter Neri
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. M. Concetta Morrone
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. David C. Burr
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to David C. Burr.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Neri, P., Morrone, M. & Burr, D. Seeing biological motion. Nature 395, 894–896 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/27661

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/27661

This article is cited by

Comments

By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines. If you find something abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate.

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing