Biological motion was described in the early '70s and again by Neri, Morrone, & Burr on p 894 of the current "Nature." I scanned the article once and have been prodded into picking it up again 3 more times. It's a growing, mildly annoying obsession, most recently watered by John Fentress.
Biological motion refers to our "seeing" intact moving people from a pattern of dots that correlate strongly with major joint locations. The more spots (from 6-11 joints), the more quickly we detect motion, direction of movement, and even the sex of the moving figure. When motionless, the dots are just dots. Neri's article asserts that infants can make these discriminations. I'm reminded of several things.
First, the notion of psychological adaptations and sensory coding. Frogs seem to have bug detectors; it's likely that we share them. It also appears that we translate moving points of light in human terms and as human movement and we do so accurately. Even for gender. Ho hum. But wait, infants do it, too. A much smaller Ho hum.
Fentress (fentress@is.dal.ca) tosses in the concept of Jungian archetypes in an unrelated discussion and Irwin Silverman (isilv@yorku.ca) mentions his past interest in archetypes. Maloney, Sickler, & Cortez (maloney@ITSA.UCSF.EDU) reported at the last HBES on archtypical themes and our preferences for them. Dave Evans (evans@brookings.net) writes poems with such imagery. Then, Howard Bloom and John discuss photographic and artistic images as perhaps eliciting these bits of memories, these pieces of experience coded by natural selection. E.O. Wilson (Consilience) mentioned the possibility of integrating some of the arts as expressions of biological science. Biological motion, bug detectors, fragmented Jungian findings -- all suggest the possibility of miniscule, innate releaser stimuli for humans, stimuli that elicit disproportionate waves of fear, immobilization, anxiety, disgust, or anger. Paul MacLean becomes a mainstream thinker again. Fentress, Silverman, and Bloom supply the missing tools for Wilson's speculations.
It's possible that auditory equivalents exist for the visual ones and that we generally swim through such impressions without remarking on them because they are so familiar. Some of us exclaim "gross" or "I'm gonna throw up" at the thought of handling a fishing worm or a news item about water leaking from coffins that had been removed from an old cemetery. We momentarily laugh, but none of us will likely pass our hands through that dribble of liquid.
Hollywood already leads us through the acceptance of partial stimuli as real events that elicit an array of feelings. It's ironic that the movies attempt to make their displays ever more real when moving networks of dots might have similar impact on audiences. Goodness, the things that Lucas could do with these effects!
There's probably also some bucks to be stolen in the cosmetics industry as well. The small signs of loser and winner, rich and poor, healthy or depressed -- all perhaps signaled by minute rather than large signals and perhaps unraveled by teenagers and fashion designers far more quickly than by evolutionary psychologists. We all should incorporate and sell to a different audience.