The Influence Of Motion Pattern On Direction And Form Coherence Detection

Visual motion perception is an important ability of information processing. Understandingdynamic events entails the integration of information about motion and form that is crucial forsuccessful interactions in complicated situation. Many early studies showed, form recognitionand motion encoding was processing of distinct mechanisms, which have been identified withventral and dorsal streams respectively. However, accumulating latest evidence argue that formand motion processing is not completely independent, two representative examples are fromimplied motion and biological motion. We are interested in whether implied motion andbiological motion process information about direction and form under multi-object condition inthe same manner as that under single-object condition. In this paper, we introduce directioncoherence and form coherence task to examine processing characteristics on direction and formcoherence of three motion patterns (implied motion, biological motion and coherent mo tion)from the behavior level.Experiment1is baseline task, under single-object condition, we examine performance ofdirection discrimination and form recognition with implied motion, biological motion andcoherent motion and find that form cue could promote processing of direction information.Experiment2and3, both under the same type of multi-object condition, we examined theinfluence of coherent level and form pattern on coherence effect from the direction and formdimension, respectively. Results show here, both direction and form coherent effect aresignificant, meanwhile form cue and direction processing are unrelated. Experiment4and5,both under the different types of multi-object condition, we examined the influence of coherentlevel and combination mode of form patterns on coherence effect from the direction and formdimension, respectively. The results revealed that significant direction and form coherent effectagain, yet biological motion has poor compatibility with implied motion and coherent motion.Major conclusions are as follows:(1) Under single-object condition, three motion patterns (implied motion, biological motionand coherent motion) all reflect that direction processing is better than form processing. (2) The mechanisms for single-object and multi-object motion perception are not the same.(3) Under multi-object condition, whether the four objects belong to the same type or differenttypes, both show significant direction and form coherent effect.(4) On the processing of direction information, biological motion is quite different fromimplied motion and coherent motion.Currently, most of researches on implied motion and biological motion just study therelationship between them and real motion, less focusing on the association between impliedmotion and biological motion themselves, let alone under multi-object condition. Complexstimulus made by a combination of multiple motion patterns is much closer to real-life situationsand also a key component of visual motion perception. Therefore, examining and comparingdifferent motion patterns in the similarities and differences on the processing of informationabout direction and form, has important theoretical and practical significance.