Elsevier

Acta Psychologica

Volume 230, October 2022, 103747
Acta Psychologica

Biological motion elicits between-person Inhibition of Return in temporal and spatial movement parameters

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103747Get rights and content
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Abstract

The present study was designed to gain a deeper understanding of the processing of biological motion stimuli. To this end, we investigated if the inhibition of return (IoR) effect emerges in initiation times and trajectories of pointing movements to targets in left and right space where the preceding cues were pointing movement of a human model or a dot with the same biological motion. Targets were randomly presented in the same or opposite side from the direction of the motion cue. It was hypothesised that the visuomotor system should resonate with the biological motion of a dot, but that the human model should exaggerate the effect. Thus, the human model should trigger stronger attention shifts compared with the dot model and lead to more robust IoR effects in both spatial (movement) and temporal parameters of the observer's pointing responses. Initiation times and the spatial parameters (angle of the hand trajectory) of the pointing movements were analysed. Results indicate that facilitation and IoR effects triggered by human and dot stimuli did not differ. Based on these findings, it seems that the crucial feature of motion cues that generate shifts in attention is biological motion, rather than human appearance per se.

Keywords

Spatially directed actions
Inhibition of Return
Biological motion cues

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