Incidental processing of biological motion

Abstract

The successful detection of biological motion can have important consequences for survival. Previous studies have demonstrated the ease and speed with which observers can extract a wide range of information from impoverished dynamic displays in which only an actor's joints are visible [1–2]. Although it has often been suggested that such biological motion processing can be accomplished relatively automatically [1–5], few studies have directly tested this assumption by using behavioral methods. Here we used a flanker paradigm [6–8] to assess how peripheral “to-be-ignored” walkers affect the processing of a central target walker. Our results suggest that task-irrelevant dynamic figures cannot be ignored and are processed to a level where they influence behavior. These findings provide the first direct evidence that complex dynamic patterns can be processed incidentally, a finding that may have important implications for cognitive, neurophysiological, and computational models of biological motion processing.