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Topic: Perception of movement

By: Abrar Ahmed

Msc. Psychology Student

Cognitive / Experimental Psychology

Lecturer: Miss Haseena

GCUF/ ICON College Jaranwala

Movement perception, process through which humans and other animals orient themselves to

their own or others’ physical movements. Most animals, including humans, move in search of

food that it often moves; they move to avoid predators and to mate. Animals must perceive their

own movements to balance themselves and to move effectively; without such perceptual

functions the chances for survival would be sharply reduced. Based on motion alone, we can

efficiently detect the presence of another creature in our visual environment, we can recognize a

familiar person, and we can attribute properties such as sex, age, emotional attributes, or

personality traits to an unfamiliar individual. In this chapter, the phenomenology of biological

motion perception is briefly summarized, and then a number of controversies that have emerged

from biological motion research over the last decades are discussed.

Visual cues to movement

The eye is by far the most effective organ for sensing movement. Some animals are especially

sensitive to visual stimuli that move in specific ways. For instance, electrical patterns from the

eye of a frog show that some elements in the organ respond only when the stimulus is about the

size of a fly moving in the insect’s range of speed. Generally the eyes of lower animals seem to

respond selectively to what is of importance to survival. In these animals the eye’s retina does

much of the visual processing. This is an economical arrangement since the animal tends to

respond only to essential stimuli, the brain having little to do but relay signals to the motor

system. It is an inflexible mechanism, however; higher animals process visual information in

more elaborate ways, the brain being more heavily involved. Thus, some cells in the visual area

of the cat’s brain respond only to moving stimuli, sets of movement-detector cells functioning
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specifically for each direction across the field of view. Features of human visual experience also

suggest that movement detectors exist in the human brain. Each retina in most higher animals has

a central (foveal) zone for detailed colour and pattern vision and a surrounding peripheral zone

that effectively is sensitive only to the grosser features of the outer visual field. The peripheral

retina is especially sensitive to movement (often a signal of danger), which induces a reflex

turning of the eyes to project the image on the fovea and permit the moving object to be

recognized.

Visual stability

Mechanisms have evolved that yield stable, clear visual input despite swaying and other blurring

factors. In a reflex mechanism called opt kinetic nystagmus, the eyes pursue a moving scene to

keep the image stationary on the retina. When they can move no farther, they snap back and

pursue the scene again in a to-and-fro alternation of slow pursuit and quick return. These eye

movements are readily observed in people who are looking at a moving pattern of stripes or

turning their heads, this response being inhibited only when something stationary is visually

fixated.

When one looks from one point to another, movements of the retinal image are the same as those

produced by a moving scene on a stationary eye. It might be thought that the sensory structures

found in the eye muscles would provide the cues for judging whether it is the eye or the scene

that has moved. Yet we see the scene as stationary only when we move our eyes voluntarily and

not when they are moved passively by the finger. This suggests that motor-nerve signals inform

us whether our eyes are moving, rather than the sensory structures in the eye muscles. When the

eye is moved by pushing it with the finger there is no normal motor discharge to inform the
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brain, and changes in retinal image are perceived as movement of the scene. Indeed, people with

paralyzed eye muscles experience the scene as moving when they try to move their eyes. When

the motor discharge thus generated is not accompanied by the expected image motion, the person

falsely perceives the scene and the eye to be moving together.

Relative visual movement

A visual field containing familiar objects provides a stable framework against which relative

motion may be judged. People often report that an isolated point of light in a dark room is

moving when it is not; the experience is known as auto kinetic movement. It was observed in

1799 by Alexander von Humboldt while he was watching a star through a telescope, and he

attributed it to movement of the star itself. Not until about 60 years later was the effect shown to

be subjective, apparently arising from instability in the sense of eye position without a visual

frame of reference. Similarly, if a small object is presented in a frame with nothing else in view,

movement usually is attributed to the object even when only the frame moves. This induced

movement effect reflects our tendency to use the larger surround as a stable frame of reference.

Recall the illusion that your train is moving when it is really the moving train alongside that,

seen through the window, is falsely accepted as the frame of reference.

People cannot perceive very slow movement; below a minimum speed (about that of the minute

hand on a watch) movements become imperceptible and can only be inferred (as in remembering

the previous position of the hour hand). At high speeds, one perceives a blurred streak rather than

a definite object in motion.

Movement aftereffect

When a parade is interrupted after some minutes, the pavement may seem to move in the

opposite direction to the marchers who have passed. Phenomena similar to this movement

aftereffect occur in other senses. For instance, after disembarking, a sailor feels the land to be

rolling like a ship as the result of kinesthetic and vestibular aftereffects. The visual movement

aftereffect probably arises when movement detectors in the brain that respond to the original

direction of motion become fatigued, leaving predominant those detectors that respond to

contrary movement.

Apparent movement

Motion-picture film is a strip of discrete, still pictures but produces the visual impression of

continuous movement. Stationary light bulbs coming on one after the other over the theatre

entrance also produce an impression of steady movement. In part, such effects of apparent

movement (called the visual phi phenomenon) depend on persistence of vision: visual response

outlasts a stimulus by a fraction of a second. When the interval between successive flashes of a

stationary light is less than this visual-persistence time, the flicker will appear to fuse into a

continuous light. The flicker frequency at which this occurs is called the perceiver’s flicker-

fusion frequency (or critical flicker frequency) and represents the temporal resolving power of

his visual system at the time. Another process on which apparent movement depends is a

tendency (called visual closure or phi) to fill in the spaces between adjacent visual objects. This

means that the movement detectors of the visual system are triggered as effectively by a closely

spaced pair of lights alternately going on and off as by a single light moving back and forth. It
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would seem that two aspects of visual function (flicker fusion and phi) make the motion-picture

industry possible.

Stroboscopic effect

When a rotating electric fan is illuminated by a flashing light source (called a stroboscope) so

that a flash arrives whenever a fan blade passes a fixed position, the blades will seem to stand

still. This is a useful way of observing fast-moving objects such as machinery or insect wings. If

the flashes occur less frequently, the object will seem to move slowly in its actual direction;

when the flashes arrive more frequently, the object will seem to move backward, as stagecoach

wheels may do in the cinema.

Visual movement in depth

An object moving directly away from an observer provides fewer visual cues of movement than

it would be moving across the field of view. However, changes in retinal-image size are

produced that give a clue to its movement. Thus a stationary, but shrinking, luminous object in

the dark is seen as if it were receding. Other clues to movement in depth are changes in the

convergence angle of the two eyes, in the focusing mechanism, and in the haziness and

brightness of the object.

Reference

Article Title: Movement perception

Website Name: Encyclopedia Britannica

URL:
https://www.britannica.com/science/moveme
nt-perception

Date: October 19, 2020