表象预期调控生物运动性别信息的识别

Anticipatory Mental Imagery Could Alter the Perception of the Gender of Biological Motion

研究表明光点生物运动包含了丰富的社会性信息,其识别过程涉及多个心理活动,其中大脑自上而下的调控过程发挥重要作用。本研究通过两个实验探讨了表象预期调控光点生物运动性别信息识别的作用。结果发现:(1)想象中性形象时被试倾向于将性别模糊光点生物运动识别为中性,较少为男性或女性;(2)两种实验条件下对性别模糊光点生物运动的性别识别都表现出"男性偏向"现象。本研究有利于揭示大脑自上而下调控光点生物运动性别信息识别的心理机制。

Human beings are remarkably sensitive to recognizing the motion of biological entities in complex visual scenes, even when it is depicted with a handful of point-lights attached to the head and major joints. A number of studies demonstrated that biological motion contains many sorts of socially relevant information about an agent such as identity, gender, emotions, and intentions. The ability of human observers to identify gender is a well-known and often cited phenomenon in the perception of biological motion. Two approaches have been advanced to explain the ability of observers to recognize gender from point-light displays. The first of these emphasized the role of gender differences in the shape of male and female bodies as indicated by hip and shoulder dimensions. The second of these emphasized the role of gender differences in the motion of male and female bodies as indicated by the lateral sway of the hip and shoulder. But recently, researchers have found that there are obvious adaptation aftereffects in the gender perception. After adapting to a male or female biological motion, the observers tend to perceive an ambiguous biological motion as a different gender. And the ＇male bias＇ makes the participants classify them as male more often than female. These results suggest that not only the bottom-top information may influence the gender perception, but also there are top-down processes that regulate the gender perception. However, the mechanism of the top-down regulation is still unknown. Many studies have found that anticipatory mental imagery has the power to anticipate and fill up the detailed information when the input information is absent or lacks detailed identify formation. Although researchers have found the imagery adaption can also cause aftereffects on the direction perception of biological motion, it is still unknown how the imagination directly influences the gender perception of biological motions. Evidence from brain imaging studies suggests that expectations or mental imagery have the power to alter perceptual judgment, affective responses and neural processing in various stimulus modalities. In this article, we investigated how mental imagery information influenced gender perception of biological motions with two experiments： one was a group with anticipatory mental imagery and the other without it. In the imagery experiment, the observers were asked to imagine the person who was with obvious gender features. There were three names, a female name, a gender neutral name, and a male name. The names were all well known to the participants. The non-imagery group only received the general instructions （i.e., information about the meaningless characters, the trial structure and the general purpose of the study） and then carrying out mathematical calculations following the names. There were also three meaningless characters. The results found that the anticipatory mental imagery of males according to the name could speed up the response of the perception of male biological motions. The results indicate that the anticipatory mental imagery could alter gender perception of ambiguous biological motion, and there may be ＇male biases＇, which could influence gender perception of biological motions in the two experiments.