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Gender Adaptation

Demo Movies

N.B. These movies are provided as an attempt to illustrate the appearance of the experimental displays used in the cited papers. However, it is not possible to ensure that these demonstrations appear on all VDU displays as they did in the original version. Therefore please refer to the original papers and/or the authors if there are questions arising from the demonstrations which appear on this site. (HJordan <at> salk.edu)

Please allow time for the movies to download as many are substantial in size

Gender Adaptation of Biological Motion Adaptation Movies

Jordan, Fallah & Stoner (submitted)

Human observers can identify gender solely from biological motion cues. We asked whether gender classification of biological motion stimuli could be affected by prior gender adaptation.

Experiment 1: Coherent Adapting stimuli

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

One of these stimuli were viewed for 11.67 s, before the brief appearance of a test stimulus.

The relative relationship between the lights across the adapting stimuli is clear when they are superimposed.

Note that this never happened during the experiment.

The influence of the adapting PLWer stimuli was tested by asking observers to discriminate the gender of the test stimulus in each trial: male or female. The duration of the test stimulus on each trial was 1 sec.

This demo movie clip illustrates two of the test stimuli, namely the extreme ends of the test stimuli range (.64/.36 - .36/.64 female/male).

The PLWer appears to stutter when it changes from a predominately female PLWer and a predominantly male PLWer

Consistent with gender adaptation, viewing male and female PLWers systematically shifted the observers’ perception of test stimuli towards the opposite gender.

The data points at the extreme left and right on each of the three curves indicate observer's performance on the two test stimuli illustrated above.

Experiment 2: Dephased Adapting stimuli

If low level adaptation occurs as a result of prolonged viewing of dynamic stimuli, what proportion of this result can be accounted for by adaptation the motion of individual dots versus the gender percept conveyed by the global motion of the adapting PLWers? To answer this, we randomized the phase relationships between individual dots in the adapting PLWers, disrupting global motion coherence but leaving the local motion of each dot unchanged.

When these dephased stimuli were used in the place of the coherent adapter (above) the adaptation effect was significantly reduced in magnitude.

Female
Neutral
Male

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