2011

Arrighi, R., Cartocci, G. & Burr, D. (2011).

Reduced perceptual sensitivity for biological motion in paraplegia patients,Curr Biol, 22 (21), R910-911.

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, there was no statistically significant reduction in contrast sensitivity for discriminating the orientation of static gratings. The results point to an interaction between perceiving and producing motion, implicating shared algorithms and neural mechanisms.