The Characteristics Of Facing Bias In Biological Motion Perception

There is a special phenomenon of the coronal view of biological motion perception.When observing an orthographically-projected point light walker,viewers may interpret it as facing the viewer(FTV)as well as facing away(FA).However,people always interpret the bistable stimuli as facing towards viewer much more than facing away.This phenomenon is called facing bias.Previous research has shown that facing bias may be influenced by both top-down and bottom-up factors.However,difference effects of top-down and bottom-up factors has not been distinguished yet.Additionally,that whether local motion information affects this special process or not is still to be discovered.For this reason,firstly,the present study examined whether local motion information this bottom-up factor affects facing bias or not by scrambling information of spatial relations and temporal relations of local motion.Secondly,this study also compared the different effects of social anxiety(top-down factor)and local motion information(bottom up factor).The results of this study will help to reveal the perception process of biological motion further,especially the process characteristics of facing bias perception.The present study consisted of three experiments:in Experiment 1,the effect of spatial relation information of local motion on facing bias was examined;in Experiment 2,the effect of temporal relation information of local motion on facing bias was examined;in Experiment 3,the effect of combined spatial and temporal relation information of local motion on facing bias was examined,and also the difference effects of top-down and bottom-up factor on facing bias was explored by comparing social anxiety and local motion information.In conclusion,the following results were obtained from this study.(1)Different from facing direction perception of lateral view biological motion,local motion information showed no effect on facing direction perception of coronal view biological motion,this result is related to bistable perception and sociobiological meanings of facing bias.(2)None of scrambling spatial relation,temporal relation,or spatio-temporal relation information of local motion had effect on facing bias.However,different social anxiety levels had main effect on facing bias.That is,top-down process plays a primary role in facing bias,but bottom-up process has much weaker effect on facing bias.Totally,the present study has shown that different from other process of biological motion,top-down process plays a primary role in facing bias,but bottom-up process has much weaker effect on facing bias.