The role of objecthood and animacy in apparent movement processing.

Although the ability to detect the actions of other living beings is key for adaptive social behavior, it is still unclear if biological motion perception is specific to human stimuli. Biological motion perception involves both bottom-up processing of movement kinematics ('motion pathway') and top-down reconstruction of movement from changes in the body posture ('form pathway'). Previous research using point-light displays has shown that processing in the motion pathway depends on the presence of a well-defined, configural shape (objecthood) but not necessarily on whether that shape depicts a living being (animacy).