Development of biological motion perception: Insights from late-sighted children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our visual system exhibits an exceptional capacity for processing the movement patterns of other humans (i.e., biological motion), which starts to emerge with very little visual experience. Even inexperienced individuals (human neonates, dark-reared chicks) can detect biological motion patterns. Patients treated for congenital cataracts can recognize human walking patterns in the first moments of unobstructed sight after a lifetime of near-blindness, not only from upright displays typical to real-life settings, but also from up-side-down displays. These demonstrations naturally lead to questioning whether visual exposure is central for acquiring this visual capacity, or if it is rather acquired phylogenetically or supported by non-visual factors (such as feedback from the observer's motor system). More intricate sensitivities, including walking direction discrimination and action recognition, are in place months after removal of congenital cataracts. However, it is not known if these capabilities are acquired after surgery or spared altogether. To probe this, twenty-five children with early-life visual deprivation and late sight onset participated in six tasks testing multiple aspects of their perception, starting prior to sight restoration, and continuing periodically for up to five years after. Our results indicate a gradual onset of abilities, modulated by the quality and extent of available visual input. Recognition of human walking patterns soon after sight onset is followed by a progression of other proficiencies: discrimination of walking direction, detection of coherent action patterns, and finally recognition of these actions. Perception of finer-resolution action patterns, including the ability to recognize fine-motor and face-movement displays, is not gained even over a period of five years. Intriguingly, recognition of complex two-person interaction sequences is exceptional, surpassing that of basic simple actions of a single individual. Our studies offer the opportunity to place different biological motion perception capabilities on a common developmental timeline, and reveal a stratification of their onset.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".