Crowding of biological motion stimuli

It is difficult to identify a target in the peripheral visual field when it is flanked by distractors. In the present study, we investigated this "crowding" effect for biological motion stimuli. Three walking biological motion stimuli were presented horizontally in the periphery with various distances between them, and observers reported the walking direction of the central figure. When the inter-walker distance was small, discriminating the direction became difficult. Moreover, the reported direction for the central target was not simply noisier, but reflected a degree of pooling of the three directions from the target and two flankers. However, when the two flanking distractors were scrambled walking biological motion stimuli, crowding was not seen. This result suggests that the crowding of biological motion stimuli occurs at a high-level of motion perception.