Ian M. Thornton
Cambridge Basic Research,
Nissan Research and Development Inc.,
Cambridge, MA
will speak on
Attending to Biological Motion
Abstract:
Johansson's point-light walker figures remain one of the most powerful and
convincing examples of the role that motion can play in the perception of
form. How exactly does our visual system take a few isolated points of
light and provide us with such compelling impressions of human action?
Furthermore, is this biological motion processing always as effortless and
automatic as it appears? In this talk I will briefly describe some of the
tasks (e.g., simple direction discrimination, discrimination under
dual-task conditions, visual search) and display manipulations (e.g. simple
and complex masking, apparent motion) my colleagues and I have been using
to explore these issues. I will argue that the perception of biological
motion can come to rely almost exclusively on either bottom-up or top-down
processing strategies, depending on the precise combination of task and
display. Interestingly, attention always appears to play some role, even in
the simplest types of biological motion display.
The lecture will take place in the
Lecture Hall, Room 203, 44 Cummington St.
on Monday, January 31, 2000
at 1:00 pm
Hosted by the
Brain and Vision Research Laboratory