The sensitivity of the human visual system to biological motion signals as defined by point light displays (Jonansson, 1973) has been shown to be finely tuned. Even from highly impoverished stimuli observers can interpret higher-order characteristics such as gender and can do so irrespective of orientation. Recently it has been demonstrated that gender-specific aftereffects can be elicited from unimodal (visual only: Troje et al., 2006; Jordan et al., 2006) or multi-modal (audiovisual: van der Zwan et al., in prep.) stimuli. Such findings are suggestive of the existence of neurons specifically tuned to high-order features. The possibility remains, however that these observed gender aftereffects are driven by lower-order, view dependent stimulus features, such as relative spatial locations or local motion cues. The current research examines the existence of neurons tuned specifically to gender by measuring the strength of the aftereffect when the test and the adapting stimuli differ in orientation.
Authors: Coralia MacHatch, Rick van der Zwan, Anna Brooks
Event: SF08: Speed Papers