Knowledge of body biomechanics influences perceptual judgments of human motion
(2021) Annual Meeting of the Belgian Association of Psychological Sciences — Location: Louvain-la-Neuve (27.May.2021)
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- Abstract
- Observers typically mislocate the final position of a moving target slightly farther along its trajectory – an effect known as the “representational momentum” (RM). In the field of human motion perception, the RM is known to be larger for movements of the arm resulting from shoulder rotations toward than away from actor’s body midline. Shoulder rotations away from the body are biomechanically harder to execute. Therefore, it has been suggested that RM for body movements is influenced by implicit knowledge of the biomechanical constraints of the body. An alternative, however, is that this effect results from a mere “landmark attraction effect” – a general tendency for larger RM effects when an object moves toward than away from another stationary object. The goal of this study was to discriminate these two accounts. In each trial of our experiment, participants saw videos depicting either an actor’s arm moving toward or away from the actor’s body or highly similar movements from a geometrical shape. We measured the size of the RM as a function of the direction of movement (toward or away) and the type of stimulus (human/shape). We found a main effect of the movement direction, indicating a general landmark attraction effect on the size of the RM, and an interaction between the conditions: the difference between the two directions of movement was larger for humans than for shapes. This indicates that knowledge of body biomechanics influences RM for body movement.
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Vandenberghe, A., & Vannuscorps, G. (2021). Knowledge of body biomechanics influences perceptual judgments of human motion. Annual Meeting of the Belgian Association of Psychological Sciences, Louvain-la-Neuve. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/29770