Does anxiety induced by social interaction influence the perception of bistable biological motion?

Think positive! Resolving human motion ambiguity in the presence of disease threat

Recently, approach-avoidance tendencies and visual perception biases have been increasingly studied using bistable point-light walkers (PLWs). Prior studies have found a facing-the-viewer bias when one is primed with general threat stimuli (e.g. angry faces), explained by the "error management theory", as failing to detect a threat as approaching is riskier than the opposite. Importantly, no study has explored how disease threat - linked to the behavioural immune system - might affect this bias. This study aimed to explore whether disease-signalling cues can alter how we perceive the motion direction of ambiguous PLWs. Throughout 3 experiments, participants indicated the motion direction of a bistable PLW previously primed with a control or disease-signalling stimuli - that is, face with a surgical mask (Experiment 1), sickness sound (Experiment 2), or face with a disease cue (Experiment 3). Results showed that sickness cues do not significantly modulate the perception of approach-avoidance behaviours. However, a pattern emerged in Experiments 2 and 3, suggesting that sickness stimuli led to more facing away percepts. Unlike other types of threat, this implies that disease-related threat stimuli might trigger a distinct perceptual bias, indicating a preference to avoid a possible infection source. Nonetheless, this finding warrants future investigations.

Untangling the confounded relationship between perceiver sex and walker sex on the bistable perception of emotion displaying point-light walkers

Point-light displays of walking gait carries an assortment of information about the individual and this information is often perceivable to others. Some of these bits of information are entangled, with some facilitating and others inhibiting each other. We sought to untangle the perception of basic threat emotions from sex of the walker and the perceiver, as expressed through the bistable perception of anticipated approaching or withdrawing point-light walkers. Stationary point-light walkers displaying anger or fear were shown to 164 psychology student perceivers, who were told that the walkers would be either walking towards them or walking away from them. Perceivers were asked to identify the displayed emotion for each walker stimulus. Expected walker direction showed no influence on the perception of either emotion, across either sex of the perceivers or walkers. Anger was identified better on male walkers and fear was identified better on female walkers. Female perceivers were able to identify both emotions better than male perceivers, but only when displayed by female walkers. The sex of both the perceiver and the walker interact to influence the perception of basic threat emotions displayed through point-light walking gait, with implications for the development of inter-sexual and intra-sexual group cohesion programs.