A new study finds that the brain uses motion cues to decipher how objects are seen
Most research studies use still pictures to explore how the brain constructs what is seen by the eyes, but we do not live in a static world. Motion cues offer a rich source of untapped information that can be beneficial in understanding how the brain categorizes objects.
A new study at Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health, employed neuroimaging to understand how the brain registers animated and static images. The results were published on Jan. 25 in the Journal of Neuroscience.
"When we talk about how images are processed in the brain, we traditionally talk about two pathways — one that examines what the object is and the second that focuses on how to interact with the object," said Sophia Robert, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychology at CMU and first author on the study. "The work that generated this theory was focused on pictures, frozen frames of what we see in our daily lives."
Motion is an important stimulus that provides information about an object. Previous work has touched on motion but mainly as it relates to human movement. Robert and her colleagues wanted to bring these two fields together to compare how the brain processes objects in static images and dynamic videos.
"There is a lot of information about an object just in the way that it moves," said Maryam Vaziri-Pashkam, a research fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health and senior author on the paper. "In this study, we wanted to see how good people were at deciphering objects by movement and what brain regions are used to extract this information."
In the study, the team developed short animations that capture the outline of a moving object, depicted with dots. During the video, the object is set in motion among a cascade of like-sized dots. The videos in the study span six object categories: human, mammal, reptile, tool, ball and pendulum/swing.
The team asked 430 participants to identify the object in each video. They found that the participants accurately identified the objects 76% of the time, even when devoid of shape, color or other visual cues.
"It is striking how good people are at identifying an object based on motion patterns," said Vaziri-Pashkam. "As soon as you see the videos, you see the object."
