People Watching

Social, Perceptual, and Neurophysiological Studies of Body Perception

Edited by Kerri Johnson and Maggie Shiffrar

Advances in Visual Cognition

The book describes cutting edge scientific findings.
The volume includes scholars from a variety of disciplines.
The book will have popular appeal, but scientific accuracy (unlike many of the "Body Language" books currently on the market).

People Watching

Social, Perceptual, and Neurophysiological Studies of Body Perception

Edited by Kerri Johnson and Maggie Shiffrar

Description

The human body has long been a rich source of inspiration for the arts, and artists have long recognized the body's special status. While the scientific study of body perception also has an important history, recent technological advances have triggered an explosion of research on the visual perception of the human body in motion, or as it is traditionally called, biological motion perception. Now reaching a point of burgeoning inter-disciplinary focus, biological motion perception research is poised to transform our understanding of person construal. Indeed, several factors highlight a privileged role for the human body as one of the most critical classes of stimuli affecting social perception. Human bodies in motion, for example, are among the most frequent moving stimulus in our environment. They can be readily perceived at a physical distance or visual vantage that precludes face perception. Moreover, body motion conveys meaningful psychological information such as social categories, emotion state, intentions, and underlying dispositions. Thus, body perception appears to serve as a first-pass filter for a vast array of social judgments from the routine (e.g., perceived friendliness in interactions) to the grave (e.g., perceived threat by law enforcement). This book provides an exciting integration of theory and findings that clarify how the human body is perceived by observers.

People Watching

Social, Perceptual, and Neurophysiological Studies of Body Perception

Edited by Kerri Johnson and Maggie Shiffrar

Advances in Visual Cognition

I. Introduction
Chapter 1: Making Great Strides: Advances in Research on the Perception of the Human Body
Chapter 2: Gunnar Johansson, Events, and Biological Motion
II. Psychophysics
Chapter 3: Top-Down versus Bottom-up Processing of Biological Motion
Chapter 4: Seeing You through Me: Creating Self-Other Correspondences for Body Perception
Chapter 5: What Does "Biological Motion" Really Mean? Differentiating Visual Percepts of Human, Animal, and Non-biological Motions
Chapter 6: Shape-Independent Processing of Biological Motion

Chapter 7: Action Perception from a Common Coding Perspective
III. Development and Individual Differences
Chapter 8: Developmental Origins of Biological Motion Perception
Chapter 9: Experience and the Perception of Biological Motion

Chapter 10: Variability in the Visual Perception of Human Motion as a Function of the Observer's Autistic Traits
Chapter 11: Development of Body Motion Processing in Normalcy and Pathology

IV. Social Perspectives
Chapter 12: Person (Mis)Perception? On the Biased Representation of the Human Body.
Chapter 13: It's the Way You Walk: Kinematic Specification of Vulnerability to Attack
Chapter 14: Coordinating Social Beings in Motion
Chapter 15: Functionalism Redux: How Adaptive Action Constrains Perception, Simulation, and Evolved Intuitions

V. Neurophysiology
Chapter 16: Neural mechanisms for action observation
Chapter 17: Neural Mechanisms for Biological Motion and Animacy
Chapter 18: The How, When, and Why of Configural Processing in the Perception of Human Movement
Chapter 19: Brain Mechanisms for Social Perception: Moving towards an Understanding of Autism
Chapter 20: From Body Perception to Action Preparation: A Distributed Neural System for Viewing Bodily Expressions of Emotion
Chapter 21: Sensory and Motor Brain Areas Subserving Biological Motion Perception: Neuropsychological and Neuroimaging Studies
Chapter 22: Computational Mechanisms of the Visual Processing of Action Stimuli

Index

People Watching

Social, Perceptual, and Neurophysiological Studies of Body Perception

Edited by Kerri Johnson and Maggie Shiffrar

Advances in Visual Cognition

Author Information

Kerri L. Johnson is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research is focused on how people form impressions of one another by using cues in the face and body. Her lab tests both the production and perception of cues that convey identities such as sex, race, age, and sexual orientation. Johnson is particularly interested in how and why a variety of cues impinge on observers' judgments of other people. To study this, she uses a variety of methods -- such as corneal reflection eye tracking, three--dimensional motion capture, computer mouse tracking, and computer animation -- to determine how social perceptions are formed.

Maggie Shiffrar is Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University. Her research is focused on how the visual system interprets moving objects. To develop a unified understanding of visual system function, members of her laboratory examine the relationships between visual physiology and visual perception for both "high" and "low" levels of analysis. This includes behavioral studies of the visual analysis of human movement, implicit memory of objects in motion, and the role of image segmentation cues in motion coherence and visual memory for shape. At present, she is studying how visual experience, motor experience, and social processes all contribute to the visual analysis of human movement.

Contributors:

John A. Bargh
Department of Psychology
Yale University
New Haven, CT, USA

H. Clark Barrett
UCLA Department of Anthropology
FPR-UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development
Los Angeles, CA, USA

Beatriz Calvo-Merino
Department of Psychology
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Madrid, Spain

Dorita H. F. Chang
School of Psychology
University of Birmingham
Birmingham, UK

Arieta Chouchourelou
Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences
European University Cyprus
Nicosia, Cyprus

James E. Cutting
Department of Psychology
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY, USA

Beatrice de Gelder
Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory
Tilburg University
Tilburg, The Netherlands

Martin A. Giese
Department of Cognitive Neurology
Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research
University Clinic Tübingen,
Tübingen, Germany

Falk Fleischer
Department of Cognitive Neurology
Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research
University Clinic Tübingen,
Tübingen, Germany

Willem E. Frankenhuis
UCLA Department of Anthropology
Los Angeles, CA, USA

Alissa Golden
Department of Psychology
Rutgers University
Newark, NJ, USA

Emily D. Grossman
Department of Cognitive Sciences,
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience
University of California Irvine
Irvine, California, USA

Merrit A. Hoover
Department of Psychology
San Francisco State University
San Francisco, CA, USA

Seon Hee Jang
Department of Dance
Sejong University
Seoul, Republic of Korea

Kerri L. Johnson
Department of Communication Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA, USA

Scott P. Johnson
UCLA Department of Psychology
Los Angeles, CA, USA

Lucy Johnston
Psychology Department
University of Canterbury
Christchurch, New Zealand

Corinne Jola
Department of Psychology
University of Surrey
Guildford, UK

Martha D. Kaiser
Child Neuroscience Laboratory
Yale Child Study Center
New Haven, CT, USA

Günther Knoblich
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour
Radboud University Nijmegen
Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Christine MacLeod
School of Psychology
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK

Kerry L. Marsh
Department of Psychology
University of Connecticut
Storrs, CT, USA

Phil McAleer
School of Psychology
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK

Lawrie S McKay
Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Ezequiel Morsella
Department of Psychology
San Francisco State University
San Francisco, CA, USA

Marina A. Pavlova
Developmental Cognitive and Social Neuroscience Unit
Department of Social and Cognitive Neuroscience
Children's Hospital
University of Tübingen
Tübingen, Germany

Kevin Pelphrey, Ph.D.
Yale Child Study Center
Yale University
New Haven, CT, USA

Karin Petrini
University College London
Institute of Ophthalmology
Department of Visual Neuroscience
London, UK

Frank E. Pollick
Department of Psychology
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK

John A. Pyles
Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition
Department of Psychology
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Catherine L. Reed
Department of Psychology
Claremont McKenna College
Claremont, CA, USA

Ayse Pinar Saygin
Department of Cognitive Science
University of California at San Diego
La Jolla, CA, USA

Natalie Sebanz
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour
Radboud University Nijmegen
Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Maggie Shiffrar
Department of Psychology
Rutgers University
Newark, NJ, USA

Sarah Shultz
Department of Psychology
Yale University
New Haven, CT, USA

David R Simmons
Department of Psychology
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK

James C Thompson
Department of Psychology
George Mason University
Fairfax, Virginia, USA

Ian M. Thornton
Department of Psychology
Swansea University
Singleton Park, Swansea, UK

Nikolaus F. Troje
Department of Psychology
School of Computing and Centre for Neuroscience Studies
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario, Canada

Robrecht P.R.D. van der Wel
Rutgers University, Camden Campus
Department of Psychology
Camden, NJ, USA

People Watching

Social, Perceptual, and Neurophysiological Studies of Body Perception

Edited by Kerri Johnson and Maggie Shiffrar

Advances in Visual Cognition

Reviews and Awards

"In this excellent collection Johnson (communication and psychology, UCLA) and Shiffrar (psychology, Rutgers) deal with the subject of biological motion... Those in search of a comprehensive overview of biological motion perception need search no further. Summing Up: Highly recommended." -- CHOICE

"The authors have produced a ground-breaking book that is the absolute go-to resource for anyone interested in learning about the origins and the direction for future research in this area. This scholarly book spans decades of empirical research findings in order to foster a better understanding of how we perceive others and interpret their attributes through the observation of human movement. This is a must-read for graduate students in psychology and communication studies, as well as students who are interested in the visual perception of the human body." --Michael S. Goldsby, PhD, CCRP, Doody's Health Sciences Book Review