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Updated: Aug 4, 2026
Measuring Attention and Visual Processing Speed by Model-based Analysis of Temporal-order Judgments
Published on: January 23, 2017
The relative importance of spatial versus temporal structure in the perception of biological motion: an event-related
1Course of General Systems Studies, Department of Multi-disciplinary Sciences, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Meguro-ku, Japan. hirai@ardbeg.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Abstract:
We investigated how the spatiotemporal structure of animations of biological motion (BM) affects brain activity. We measured event-related potentials (ERPs) during the perception of BM under four conditions: normal spatial and temporal structure; scrambled spatial and normal temporal structure; normal spatial and scrambled temporal structure; and scrambled spatial and temporal structure. As in a previous study, we identified two negative components at both occipitotemporal regions: N210 reflected general motion processing while N280 reflected the processing of BM. We analyzed the averaged ERPs in the 200-300 ms response time window and found that spatial structure had a substantial effect on the magnitude of the averaged response amplitude in both hemispheres. This finding suggests that spatial structure of point-lights elicits a stronger response in the occipitotemporal region than temporal structure for the BM perception.
