S2-2: Body Movements: From Dots to Bots

The perception of others' body movements and actions is critical for important functions such as hunting prey, avoiding predators, communication, and social interaction. In primates, the perception of body movements is supported by network of temporal, parietal, and premotor brain areas. Our goal is to elucidate functional properties of this system. I will present work with two kinds of stimuli that allow us to focus on the role of visual form and visual motion in body movement perception. Neuroimaging, neuropsychological, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) experiments with “dots” (point-light biological motion) allow us to focus on the role of motion in body movement processing (though it turns out it is difficult to abstract away from form even with these stimuli). To manipulate visual form and visual motion in fully illuminated stimuli, we also use a stimulus set of actions carried out by humans as well as “bots” (humanoid robots) in fMRI and EEG studies. Together, these studies establish the brain regions that support body movement perception in the human brain, and suggest steps towards identifying their functional and computational properties