Perceiving biological motions of real dog actions and human mimicry

Human observers perceive human and animal actions from 10-20 point lights attached to body joints. We aimed to investigate human perceptual sensitivity in the biomechanics of animals and humans. We created quadruped point-light stimuli based on motion-captured data of real dogs and of humans mimicking the actions of dogs. Human participants were asked to evaluate how natural the stimulus was as an action of a quadruped animal after observing randomized trials of dog actions and human mimicry. We found that participants generally rated dog actions as more natural than human mimicry. In a subsequent experiment, we presented inverted stimuli and found that the difference in ratings of authenticity between dog actions and human mimicry decreased. These results suggest that human observers can distinguish the biomechanics of animal actions from that of human mimicry, and that its sensitivity is particular to upright postures because of configural processing.