![]() Rhodes, Jeffery, Watson, Clifford, and Nakayama ( 2003) showed similar aftereffects for judgments of facial attractiveness, and these adaptation effects have also been seen in the perception of facial categories such as gender, ethnicity, and expression (Hsu & Young, 2004 Webster, Kaping, Mizokami, & Duhamel, 2004). An adaptation effect for face shape (i.e., a figural aftereffect due to a face-distortion manipulation) was described by Webster and MacLin ( 1999), and the generalization of this effect over image size and orientation, including inversion, was further assessed by Watson and Clifford ( 2003) and Zhao and Chubb ( 2001), respectively. Over the past few years, it has become obvious that even complex processes such as face perception are subject to intriguing aftereffects, which may shed light on underlying mechanisms and representations. However, they are not restricted to low-level visual processing. Adaptation aftereffects have played an important role in shaping the understanding of basic visual dimensions such as color, motion, spatial frequency, and orientation (e.g., see reviews by Clifford, Wenderoth, & Spehar, 2000 Wade & Verstraten, 1998 Webster, 1996). Such an effect might be analogous to other adaptation aftereffects observed in both low- and high-level visual domains. Particularly, we assess whether and to what extent gender discrimination of a point-light walker can be biased by exposure to a preceding biological motion display. Here, our interest is in extending the existing work on gender perception in biological motion by exploring its manipulation by “extraneous” stimuli and perceptual history. Troje ( 2002a) extended these findings by showing that, for gender classification, dynamic information is generally more informative than static cues contained in point-light displays of human walkers. These researchers also tested participants with frontal-view point-light walkers presented very briefly (i.e., fractions of a walk cycle), showing accurate gender perception at even these short exposures. In pitting one against the other, they observed that the influence of the chosen dynamic cue on gender discrimination seemed to outweigh that of the static cue. ![]() Mather and Murdoch ( 1994) explicitly explored the relative contributions of the shoulder–hip ratio as an example for a static cue and lateral body sway as an example for a dynamic cue in gender perception. Subsequently, work by Runeson and Frykholm ( 1983) sought to quantify the accuracy of gender discrimination during complex activity, including walking, sitting, jumping, lifting, and so forth, and even explored the subtle but significant distinction between perceiving veridical versus feigned, acted gender. Barclay, Cutting, & Kozlowski ( 1978) further studied the influence of exposure duration, video speed, blurring, and inversion. Not long after Johansson's first reports, Kozlowski & Cutting ( 1977, 1978) investigated participants' accuracy in gender discriminations of point-light walkers in video (viewed from the side), along with the influence of arm swing, walking speed, and partial occlusion on this discriminative ability. One aspect of biological motion perception that has been studied in some detail in recent decades has been our ability to discriminate the gender of individuals represented as point-light actors (e.g., point-light walkers). Since that time, a wide variety of research has investigated our ability to perceive important characteristics of both actors and their actions, along with the various factors that influence underlying perceptual processes. The compelling and perceptually rich nature of biological motion, as exemplified by human movement represented only by point lights at a few joints, has received a great deal of attention following the pioneering work of Johansson ( 1973, 1975).
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