Subconfigurations of the human form in the perception of biological motiondisplays

We report four experiments examining processes that contribute to the perce ption of point-light displays of human locomotion. In three experiments, we employed a simultaneous masking paradigm to examine the visual system's us e of configural information in global analyses of biological motion display s. In the fourth experiment, we obtained descriptions of our stimulus displ ays from naive observers. Performance in both the detection and identificat ion studies suggests that the visual system responded equivalently to figur es exhibiting any organization of limbs that is consistent with the human f orm. Moreover, the subconfigurations best detected were also most likely to be described independently as depicting a human figure. Thus our findings provide evidence that the visual system can exploit characteristic subconfi gurations of the human form in the perception of human locomotion. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PsycINFO classification: 2323.