Description
The human body has long been a rich source of inspiration for the arts, and artists have long recognized the body's special status. While the scientific study of body perception also has an important history, recent technological advances have triggered an explosion of research on the visual perception of the human body in motion, or as it is traditionally called, biological motion perception. Now reaching a point of burgeoning inter-disciplinary focus, biological motion perception research is poised to transform our understanding of person construal. Indeed, several factors highlight a privileged role for the human body as one of the most critical classes of stimuli affecting social perception. Human bodies in motion, for example, are among the most frequent moving stimulus in our environment. They can be readily perceived at a physical distance or visual vantage that precludes face perception. Moreover, body motion conveys meaningful psychological information such as social categories, emotion state, intentions, and underlying dispositions. Thus, body perception appears to serve as a first-pass filter for a vast array of social judgments from the routine (e.g., perceived friendliness in interactions) to the grave (e.g., perceived threat by law enforcement). This book provides an exciting integration of theory and findings that clarify how the human body is perceived by observers.
Table of Contents
I. IntroductionChapter 1: Making Great Strides: Advances in Research on the Perception of the Human BodyChapter 2: Gunnar Johansson, Events, and Biological MotionII. PsychophysicsChapter 3: Top-Down versus Bottom-up Processing of Biological MotionChapter 4: Seeing You through Me: Creating Self-Other Correspondences for Body PerceptionChapter 5: What Does "Biological Motion" Really Mean? Differentiating Visual Percepts of Human, Animal, and Non-biological MotionsChapter 6: Shape-Independent Processing of Biological MotionChapter 7: Action Perception from a Common Coding PerspectiveIII. Development and Individual DifferencesChapter 8: Developmental Origins of Biological Motion PerceptionChapter 9: Experience and the Perception of Biological MotionChapter 10: Variability in the Visual Perception of Human Motion as a Function of the Observer's Autistic TraitsChapter 11: Development of Body Motion Processing in Normalcy and PathologyIV. Social PerspectivesChapter 12: Person (Mis)Perception? On the Biased Representation of the Human Body.Chapter 13: It's the Way You Walk: Kinematic Specification of Vulnerability to AttackChapter 14: Coordinating Social Beings in MotionChapter 15: Functionalism Redux: How Adaptive Action Constrains Perception, Simulation, and Evolved IntuitionsV. NeurophysiologyChapter 16: Neural mechanisms for action observationChapter 17: Neural Mechanisms for Biological Motion and AnimacyChapter 18: The How, When, and Why of Configural Processing in the Perception of Human MovementChapter 19: Brain Mechanisms for Social Perception: Moving towards an Understanding of AutismChapter 20: From Body Perception to Action Preparation: A Distributed Neural System for Viewing Bodily Expressions of EmotionChapter 21: Sensory and Motor Brain Areas Subserving Biological Motion Perception: Neuropsychological and Neuroimaging StudiesChapter 22: Computational Mechanisms of the Visual Processing of Action StimuliIndex
