Gravity and its Role in Biological Motion Perceptions

Gravity links spatial and temporal aspects of the behaviour of objects in our visual environment. Gravity also imposes constraints on moving animals. Our visual system employs knowledge about these constraints in order to detect, perceive and adequately interpret biological motion. Psychophysical experiments show how this is achieved.

Size and speed demo

This demo simulates an experiment (Jokisch and Troje, 2003) in which a quadruped point-light animal, walking with different gait frequencies through a structured environment, was presented to observers. They had to adjust its size to look “as natural as possible”. In doing so, they basically reproduced the inverse quadratic relation between size and frequency as formulated in the pendulum law.

This demo is based on a flash plugin and since December 2020, it is no longer supported by most browsers. In order to view this demo, you must access this page using a browsers that supports the flash plugin.