Doctoral Dissertation Research: Imaging Brain Areas Involved in Biological Motion Perception

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Humans are incredibly skilled at visually recognizing the actions of others, even when the optical information portraying those actions is reduced to a sparse collection of light points attached to the individual's joints. In these "point-light" animations, accurate perception of body movements can only be recovered from the integration of the associated motion signals over space and time. Brain imaging research has disclosed that a region on the ventral bank of the posterior temporal sulcus (posterior STS) becomes active when people view human activity portrayed by these point-light animations. This project will examine the relationship between activity levels in posterior STS and the quality of the perceptual experience associated with viewing biological motion. Observers will view single trials of biological motion animations that range in coherence from completely biological to completely scrambled and will rate them according to perceived coherence. The experiments will also examine the extent to which posterior STS is specialized for whole-body human movement. Measures of neural activity will be taken as observers view point-light animations of animal motion, hand movements and face movements. Finally, the anatomical location of posterior STS is quite near neural areas involved in auditory perception. If posterior STS lies within multi-modal cortical areas, then measures will be made of the extent to which neural signals originating from STS can be modulated by congruent versus incongruent auditory and visual events.