The Role Of Body Shape And Body Movement In The Working Memory Processing Of Biological Movements

Biological motion refers to the continuous configuration movement of human or animals in space.We effortlessly identify actions,intentions,and emotions based on the body actions of others.This remarkable skill relies on the accurate discrimination of both body form and body motion cues.The previous studies have explored the mechanism of biological motion in visual perception,such as the role of the processing of body form and the processing of body motion,as well as the distinct neural mechanisms for body form and body motion.Effective processing of biological motion not only involves visual perception,but also the participation of working memory(WM),so as to further form the cognitive processing which will facilitate social cognition and social interaction.However,the role of body form information and body motion information in the WM processing mechanism of biological motion has not been addressed,as well as the influence factors of the WM processing of biological motion.The present study discussed the WM processing mechanism of biological motion by emphasized the role of body form information and body motion information,and further explored the WM processing mechanism of biological motion from the perspective of perceiver and perceptual object.Discussion on this issue can reveal the processing mechanism of biological motion,and further contribute to explain the relationship between the biological motion perception and WM.Three studies were conducted.The first explored how body form information and body motion information of biological motion is respectively maintained in WM.Some brain activity is invariably noted within form-processing regions during biological motion perception,suggesting that both body motion and body form processes do contribute to biological motion perception.The way in which stimuli are initially processed in visual perception can directly influence the way in which the stimuli are selected,encoded,maintained and retrieved.Therefore,we explored whether the processing of body form for biological motion would occur during the ecoding and maintenance stage of WM,and how the processing of body form and the processing of body motion influence the WM processing mechanism of biological motion.The second further examined the role of body form information and body motion information in the WM processing mechanism of biological motion when perceivers with field dependence-independence cognitive styles process different WM tasks.The third investigatged the influence factors(the amount of ellipses,frame duration of ellipses,and noise)of biological motion in WM from the perspective of perceptual object,in order to reveal the WM processing mechanism of biological motion.There has been a considerable debate on the role of body form and body motion in the visual perception of biological motion.The processing body form and the processing of body motion rely on dissociable neural mechanisms.The way in which stimuli are initially processed in visual perception can directly influence the way in which the stimuli are selected,encoded,maintained and retrieved.Therefore,we hypothesized that and the processing of biological motion in WM relies on the processing of both body form and body motion that rely on dissociable neural mechanisms;perceivers with field dependence-independence cognitive styles process different in the WM processing of biological motion;the characteristics of perceptual object influence the WM processing of biological motion.Three types of visual information(body action,body form and body motion)were selected,which were expressed by ellipse-light displays.Adopting a change-detection task,the present study aimed to discuss the aforementioned hypotheses by using both behavioral and the event-related potentials(ERP)technique.The present study was composed of three parts.The first part explored how body form information and body motion information of biological motion is respectively maintained in WM.According to manipulation of the experimental material in previous studies,we designed biological motion as experimental materials in the present study.Experiment 1a and 1b investigated whether body form can be used for the representation of biological motion WM,by using a change-detection task that presented to-be-memorized body action and body form stimuli separately,or together.The results showed that the body form was encoded when to-be-memorized body action and body form stimuli were presented separately.The memory performance for body action stimuli decreased as the load of body form increased,and for body form decreased as the load of body action stimuli increased.In Experiment 2,it aimed to investigate the role of body form and body motion in the WM processing of biological motion by adopting a change-detection task that added a static/dynamic interference paradigm.The results showed that form-based interference impaired memory for body form information,and motion-based interference impaired memory for body motion information.In Experiment 3,slow potential(SP)was taken as an index,the amplitude which reflects the load of the represented stimuli in WM.We explored the neural mechanisms for body form and body motion in the WM processing of biological motion by event-related potential technique.These results indicated that the intensity of brain activity for body form was higher than body motion at encoding stage of WM;whereas,the intensity of brain activity for body motion was higher than body form at maintenance stage of WM.The second part examined the role of body form information and body motion information in the WM processing mechanism of biological motion from the perspective of perceivers with field dependence-independence cognitive styles.We examined the capacity of body motion(Experiment 4a),body form(Experiment 4b),biololgical motion(Experiment 4c)for individual with field-dependent and field-independent cognitive styles,and the differences when they performed the biological motion WM task,body motion WM task and body form WM task(Experiment 5).These results indicated that the capacity of body motion for field-independent participants was higher than field-dependent participants,whereas the capacity of body form was lower than field-dependent participants.The performance of field-independent participants was better than field-dependent participants when performed body motion WM task,whereas the performance of field-dependent participants was better than field-independent participants when performed body form WM taskThe third part investigated the WM processing mechanism of biological motion from the perspective of the characteristics of perceptual object.We examined how the factors of the amount of ellipses(Experiment 6),frame duration of ellipses with the simulated walking speed constant(Experiment 7a),frame duration of ellipses with the number of presented frames constant(Experiment 7b),and the presence of background noise(Experiment 8)influenced the representions of biological motion WM.These results indicated that the decreased amount of ellipses and images,as well as the static scramble ellipse-light noise impaired the performance for body form information.In the condition of constant number of images for animation,the increased duration of ellipses improved the performance for body motion information,whereas the scramble ellipse-light displays noise impaired the performance for body motion information.The main findings of this study were the follows.(1)The inputs of biological motion are consolidated into WM,and maintained in WM in the manner of the processing of both body form and body motion,and then integrated an action;the psychological resources to process body form information are more than body motion information at encoding stage of WM;whereas,the psychological resources to process body motion information are more than body form information at maintenance stage of WM.(2)Perceivers with different cognitive styles influence the WM processing of biological motion.Filed-independent individuals are more likely to rely on the body motion information in the WM processing of biological motion;whereas filed-dependent individuals are more likely to rely on the body form information in the WM processing of biological motion.(3)The characteristics of perceptual object influence the processing of biological motion in WM.The decreased amount of ellipses and the static scramble ellipse-light noise impair the processing of body form in the WM processing of biological motion;the increased duration of ellipses facilitates the processing of body motion,whereas the scramble noise with body motion information impairs the processing of body motion in the WM processing of biological motion.