Recognition of Animal Locomotion from Dynamic Point-Light Displays

To date, studies of biological motion have been restricted to displays of humans filmed (or synthesised by computer) with lights attached at the major joints. Observers can readily extract meaning from such displays. There have been no studies to assess the generality of this ability by assessing observers' accuracy in identifying various animals solely on the basis of biological motion. An experiment is reported for which biological-motion displays were created from the stop-action photographs taken by Muybridge in the last century. Naive observers could reliably identify the animals involved when biological-motion displays were animated, but not when they were given static views of dot positions. Thus the ability to interpret biological motion is general and is not restricted to human movements.