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Adaptation of gender derived from biological motion

Nature Neuroscience volume 9, pages 738–739 (2006)Cite this article

Abstract

Human observers adapted to complex biological motions that distinguish males from females: viewing the gait of one gender biased judgments of subsequent gaits toward the opposite gender. This adaptation was not simply due to local features of the stimuli but instead relied upon the global motion of the figures. These results suggest the existence of neurons selective for gender and demonstrate that gender-from-motion judgments are not fixed but depend upon recent viewing history.

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Figure 1: Gender discrimination performance after viewing male (blue), female (red) and gender-neutral (black) PLWers.

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Acknowledgements

We thank B. Krekelberg and J. Reynolds for their useful comments. This research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (grant 5T32MH020002-05 to H.J.) and the National Eye Institute (grant 2RO1EY12872-05 to G.R.S.).

Author information

Author notes

  1. Heather Jordan & Mazyar Fallah

    Present address: Center for Vision Research, York University, 4500 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Salk Institute, 10010 North Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla, 92037, California, USA

    Heather Jordan, Mazyar Fallah & Gene R Stoner

Authors
  1. Heather Jordan
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  2. Mazyar Fallah
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  3. Gene R Stoner
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Contributions

H.J. designed and conducted the experiment, constructed the stimuli, analyzed the data and contributed to discussions and writing the manuscript. M.F. contributed to discussions and writing the manuscript. G.R.S. had the original experimental idea, contributed to discussions and writing the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Heather Jordan.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Video 1

Examples of the coherent adapting PLWer stimuli used in both experiment 1 and 2, showing the female (left), neutral (center) and male (right) stimuli (MOV 518 kb)

Supplementary Video 2

Two examples of the test stimuli are shown here, namely the extreme ends of the test stimuli range (.64/.36 female/male & .36/.64 female/male). (MOV 694 kb)

Supplementary Video 3

Examples of the dephased adapting PLWer stimuli used in experiment 2, showing the female (left), neutral (center) and male (right) stimuli. (MOV 735 kb)

Supplementary Methods (PDF 72 kb)

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Jordan, H., Fallah, M. & Stoner, G. Adaptation of gender derived from biological motion. Nat Neurosci 9, 738–739 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1710

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