An algorithm to generate dynamic point-light displays

Recognition of animal locomotion from dynamic point-light displays.

To date, studies of biological motion have been restricted to displays of humans filmed (or synthesised by computer) with lights attached at the major joints. Observers can readily extract meaning from such displays. There have been no studies to assess the generality of this ability by assessing observers' accuracy in identifying various animals solely on the basis of biological motion. An exp...

Emotion perception from dynamic and static body expressions in point-light and full-light displays.

Research on emotion recognition has been dominated by studies of photographs of facial expressions. A full understanding of emotion perception and its neural substrate will require investigations that employ dynamic displays and means of expression other than the face. Our aims were: (i) to develop a set of dynamic and static whole-body expressions of basic emotions for systematic investigation...

Markerless motion-capture for point-light displays

Perceiving visual prosody from point-light displays

This study examined the perception of linguistic prosody from augmented point-light displays that were derived from motion tracking six talkers producing different prosodic contrasts. In Experiment 1, we determined perceivers’ ability to use these abstract visual displays to match prosody across modalities (audio to video), when the non-matching visual display was segmentally identical and diff...

Young children can extend motion verbs to point-light displays.

In the first study using point-light displays (lights corresponding to the joints of the human body) to examine children's understanding of verbs, 3-year-olds were tested to see if they could perceive familiar actions that corresponded to motion verbs (e.g., walking). Experiment 1 showed that children could extend familiar motion verbs (e.g., walking and dancing) to videotaped point-light actio...