PRIMING AND RECOGNITION OF HUMAN MOTION PATTERNS

Left-right orientation and size incongruence is known to affect recogn ition memory for objects but not object priming. In the present study, the effects of study-test changes in left-right orientation and size on old-new recognition decisions and long-term priming of human motion patterns were examined. Experiment 1 showed effects of orientation in congruence on both recognition and priming. Experiment 2 showed an eff ect of size incongruence on recognition memory but not on priming. It is suggested that the representations of human actions that underlie h uman motion priming are on a level that preserve orientation, possibly because of the importance of dynamic information for perceiving motio n patterns or because encoding of human motion is governed by a body s chema (e.g. Reed & Farah, 1995). In contrast, low-level metric informa tion such as size is inconsequential to priming because priming involv es identification of shape, which is not affected by size transformati ons. The effect of size on recognition memory, on the other hand, show s that explicit recognition decisions may draw on any available episod ic information, including metric attributes, to make an old/new discri mination.