Understanding intention from minimal displays of human activity.

Full Abstract

The impression of animacy from the motion of simple shapes typically relies on synthetically defined motion patterns resulting in pseudorepresentations of human movement. Thus, it is unclear how these synthetic motions relate to actual biological agents. To clarify this relationship, we introduce a novel approach that uses video processing to reduce full-video displays of human interactions to animacy displays, thus creating animate shapes whose motions are directly derived from human actions. Furthermore, this technique facilitates the comparison of interactions in animacy displays from different viewpoints-an area that has yet to be researched. We introduce two experiments in which animacy displays were created showing six dyadic interactions from two viewpoints, incorporating cues altering the quantity of the visual information available. With a six-alternative forced choice task, results indicate that animacy displays can be created via this naturalistic technique and reveal a previously unreported advantage for viewing intentional motion from an overhead viewpoint.

Author information

Author/s: McAleer, Phil (P); Pollick, Frank E (FE);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland. phil(-atsign-)psy.gla.ac.uk

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Behavior research methods (Behav Res Methods), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2008-Aug; vol 40 (issue 3) : pp 830-9

Dates: Created 2008/08/13; Completed 2008/09/17;

PMID: 18697679, status: MEDLINE (last retrieved date: 2/18/2009)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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