Citation

Arrighi R, Cartocci G, Burr D. Curr. Biol. 2011; 21(22): R910-1.

Affiliation

Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Firenze, Via San salvi 12 Italy.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2011.09.048

PMID

22115454

Abstract

Many physiological and psychophysical studies suggest that the perception and execution of movement may be linked. Here we ask whether severe impairment of locomotion could impact on the capacity to perceive human locomotion. We measured sensitivity for the perception of point-light walkers - animation sequences of human biological motion portrayed by only the joints - in patients with severe spinal injury. These patients showed a huge (nearly three-fold) reduction of sensitivity for detecting and for discriminating the direction of biological motion compared with healthy controls, and also a smaller (∼40%) reduction in sensitivity to simple translational motion. However, they showed no statistically significant reduction in contrast sensitivity for discriminating the orientation of static gratings. The results point to a strong interaction between perceiving and producing motion, implicating shared algorithms and neural mechanisms.

Language: en