UC Berkeley Web Feature
Seeing two figures in coordinated action helps brain pick out movements of one
Using motion capture technology, UC Berkeley vision scientists created "dots" to represent the movements of fighters (left) and dancers. The researchers measured the impact on visual discrimination when the dots and images were manipulated. (Videos courtesy of Peter Neri, UC Berkeley)
The dots in the video segments above show movements of fighters. On the left, the figures are interacting with each other naturally and the action is synchronized. In the desynchronized segments to the right, the movements of one figure are 11-seconds off from the movements of the second figure. In the non-target sequences, the action was further manipulated by randomly scrambling the dots of one figure. In all segments, the color of the dots were randomly assigned to be either black or white.