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Are we visual animals? Chouchourelou, Jacobs & Shiffrar

For well over 30 years, vision researchers have commonly used the term “biological motion” to refer to point-light displays of human movement. This phrase comes from Gunnar Johansson’s classic 1973 article in which he explicitly tested whether his vector analysis model of visual motion perception (e.g., Johansson, 1950; 1964) applied to the perception of animal motion, in general. The stimuli in this 1973 article were pointlight displays of human motion. However, this choice of stimuli appears to have reflected convenience rather than theoretical necessity. Indeed, Johansson explicitly stated on several occasions that he was searching for a perceptual mechanism that analyzed all categories of visual motion in the same manner (e.g., Johansson, 1976). Johansson (1973) noted that observers in his studies described their visual percepts of point-light displays of human movement as particularly vivid and he attributed this vividness to observers’ extensive previous visual experience with human motion. Johansson did not interpret his data as suggesting the existence of differentiated visual processes dedicated to the perception of human action. In sum, Johansson (1973) used the term “biological motion” to refer to the movements of living animals: both human and non-human. However, vision researchers have used the term, more often than not, to refer to point-light displays of human motion. As a result, in many postJohansson articles, it is not clear whether researchers believe that the results of their point-light studies are specific to the perception of human motion or generalize to the perception of any dynamic biological entity. Thus, the current meaning of the term “biological motion” is ambiguous in the vision sciences. Would it be best for us to use the term “biological motion” to refer to the motions of all animals, as the phrase suggests and Johansson’s original work assumed? Using the phrase “biological motion” in this way would be appropriate if both human and animal motions were analyzed in the same way. On the other hand, if human observers analyze human and animal movements differently, then vision researchers would be better served by modifying their use of this phrase so that it describes either the perception of human motion or the perception of nonhuman animal motion. The goal of this chapter is to examine the degree to which visual analyses of point-light displays of human movement overlap with, or are differentiated from, the visual analyses of point-light displays of animal movement and nonbiological movement.