Crowding effect for discriminating walking direction of a biological motion(Summary of Awarded Presentation at the 31st Annual Meeting)

Abstract

It is difficult to identify a target in the peripheral visual field when it is flanked by close distractors. In the present study, we investigated this "crowding" effect on the ability to discriminateion of the direction of a point-light biological motion. Three point-light walkers were presented horizontally in the periphery and the central figure was the target. When the inter-walker distance was small, discriminating the direction of the target became difficult. Moreover, the reported direction for the target was reflected in the pooling of the three directions. These results indicate that crowding occurs for biological motion perception. However, when the scrambled point-light walkers flanked the target as distractors, crowding was not seen. This result suggests that crowding in biological motion perception occurs at a high level of motion perception.