comparing biological motion perception in two distinct human societies比较生物运动知觉两个截然不同的人类社会.pdf

Comparing Biological Motion Perception in Two Distinct Human Societies 1,2 3 ¤ 3,4 5 Pierre Pica *, Stuart Jackson * , Randolph Blake , Nikolaus F. Troje ´ ´ 1 Unite Mixte de Recherche 7023, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Saint-Denis, France, 2 Laboratoire Structure Formelle du Langage, Universite Paris 8, Saint- Denis, France, 3 Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America, 4 Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, 5 Department of Psychology, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada Abstract Cross cultural studies have played a pivotal role in elucidating the extent to which behavioral and mental characteristics depend on specific environmental influences. Surprisingly, little field research has been carried out on a fundamentally important perceptual ability, namely the perception of biological motion. In this report, we present details of studies carried out with the help of volunteers from the Mundurucu indigene, a group of people native to Amazonian territories in Brazil. We employed standard biological motion perception tasks inspired by over 30 years of laboratory research, in which observers attempt to decipher the walking direction of point-light (PL) humans and animals. Do our effortless skills at perceiving biological activity from PL animations, as revealed in laboratory settings, generalize to people who have never before seen representational depictions of human and animal activity? The results of our studies provide a clear answer to this