Type of 3D display influences visual perception of human motion

What is it about?

Human motion stimuli are frequently employed in a wide range of research fields. For example, motion recognition tasks can be used to diagnose neurodevelopmental diseases, or to evaluate the aesthetics and emotion of an artistic performance. In these cases, human motion is often recorded from "real people" and transposed into 3D displays, such as stick-figures, as they allow to standardize recordings from different individuals. Nevertheless, no convention is established regarding the selection of an adequate display for specific study purposes. Could it be that adopting varied displays yells significantly different perceptual outcomes? This paper examines how 4 display types (point-light figure, stick figure, body mass and skeleton) shape observers' perception of music performance.

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Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash

Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Our findings suggest that displays presenting higher anatomic detail perform better at conveying high-level, subjective properties such as expressiveness or quality than displays providing reduced three-dimensional information. These results underline the relevance of thoroughly considering visual displays as a variable at play in the design of perceptual studies, since they can influence how observers perceive and evaluate human performance.