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... and Vuong (2004) demonstrated incidental processing of upright oriented PLW flankers during judgments of the walking direction of the displays. Upright point-light walkers can elicit incidental processing while static, scrambled or chimeric ones cannot, but in these studies they did not address the question of inversion. Incidental processing was indicated by an increase in the time it took to make direction judgments when the direction of the flankers was incongruent with the direction of the target. The task irrelevant flankers interfered with the visual processing of the target. Recently, Shi et al. (2010) reported effects of upright PLWs on the accuracy of reporting the perceived direction of a Gabor patch. Accuracy was significantly lower when the walking direction of an upright PLW was incongruent with the orientation of the Gabor patch. Importantly, no such effect was found for inverted PLWs. This suggests the existence of a perceptual cue that triggers reflexive attentional orienting for upright, but not for inverted, PLWs. This is consistent with previous results regarding a general inversion effect and evidence for a “life detector” (see e.g., Johnson, 2006; Troje & Westhoff, 2006). In o...

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...evealed a significant reflexive attentional orienting effect to biological motion walking direction in the upright condition (p , .001). In contrast to the 4.5-year-old children, the 5.5-year-old children’s attention was no longer influenced by the congruence of biological motion walking direction in the inverted condition (p . .5), consistent with the results of adults. Moreover, a direct comparison between 4.5- and 5.5-year-old children revealed a significant interaction between Target Congruence (congruent vs. incongruent) and Age Group (4.5 years vs. 5.5 years) in the inverted condition, F(1, 24) 5 4.27, p 5 .05, g2 5 .15, but not in the upright condition, F(1, 24) 5 .05, p . .10, g2 5 .01. Discussion The present study employed a point-light walker as a central cue to investigate whether the reflexive attentional orienting effect to biological motion walking direction and the associated inversion effect emerge and develop at an early age. Using a modified central cueing paradigm, we found that children aged 4 to 6 years, similar to adults, showed a robust reflexive attentional effect to upright biological motion stimuli. In other words, the reflexive orienting of spatial attention to ...

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...-normal vision. The Ethical Committee of the Department of Developmental and Social Psychology of the University of Padova approved all the experimental procedures (Protocol number: 1203).3.1.2. Stimuli Stimuli consisted of an animation of a rotating point-light circle (rotating clockwise or counterclockwise). A line was drawn at the bottom or the top of the circle trajectory to depict a flat floor or ceiling that determined the frame of reference. As a result, the circle looked like moving toward the left or right on the floor or the ceiling, similar to the percept of the point-light walker (Shi et al., 2010). The frequency of rotation was controlled so that it was similar to the walking cycle in experiment 1. In experiment 1, the walking cycle, entailing two steps, lasted 1200 ms. Similarly the single dot in this experiment performed two rotations in 1200 ms with a constant speed. Stimuli were displayed on a 1024 768 pixel monitor. All stimuli appeared as a white dot on a black background and the full dot trajectory subtended a visual angle of 8.5 8.5 (9 9 cm), the target subtended a visual angle of 5.7 5.7 (6 6 cm), and finally the distance between the center of the cue and the cen...

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...a cue for the Posner paradigm and suggested movement is a salient cue in the attention orienting system, with participants showing higher accuracy ratings after presented with movement congruent cues =-=[13]-=-. This further provides evidence for the motion-based theory of biological motion processing. However, the previously mentioned study used strictly the forward walker, where the orientation in posture...

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...animate beings. Observers also automatically process the motion of other humans to the extent that this processing can interfere with other tasks [6–8] and can lead to reflexive attentional orienting =-=[9]-=-. Furthermore, human motion affects how children and adults allocate visual attention to social scenes [10]. Movements of the human body are thought to be processed at a range of levels within the vis...

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... direction andsentirely accounted for the observed inversion effects. This result has been replicated and extended in a number ofsstudies (Chang & Troje, 2008, 2009a; Saunders, Suchan, &sTroje, 2009; =-=Shi, Weng, He, & Jiang, 2010-=-; Thompson, Hansen, Hess, & Troje, 2007). In a prior study (Chang & Troje,s2008), we showed that the inversion of scrambled point-lightsdisplays not only affects observers’ ability to retrieve directi...