Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences
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Electrophysiology and brain imaging of biological motion

Aina Puce

Aina Puce

Centre for Advanced Imaging, Department of Radiology, West Virginia University, PO Box 9236, Morgantown, WV 26506–9236, USA

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and
David Perrett

David Perrett

School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9JU, UK

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Published:https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2002.1221

    The movements of the faces and bodies of other conspecifics provide stimuli of considerable interest to the social primate. Studies of single cells, field potential recordings and functional neuroimaging data indicate that specialized visual mechanisms exist in the superior temporal sulcus (STS) of both human and non–human primates that produce selective neural responses to moving natural images of faces and bodies. STS mechanisms also process simplified displays of biological motion involving point lights marking the limb articulations of animate bodies and geometrical shapes whose motion simulates purposeful behaviour. Facial movements such as deviations in eye gaze, important for gauging an individual's social attention, and mouth movements, indicative of potential utterances, generate particularly robust neural responses that differentiate between movement types. Collectively such visual processing can enable the decoding of complex social signals and through its outputs to limbic, frontal and parietal systems the STS may play a part in enabling appropriate affective responses and social behaviour.