ArticlePLoS biology2021
Perception of biological motion by jumping spiders.
Article in PLoS biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 60 citations in OpenAlex.
- Genomic signature of repeated transitions to diurnality in spiders.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Sensitivity to permanent non-functionality in Goffin's cockatoos (Cacatua goffiniana).Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Visual reversals and biases while observing ambiguous spinning biological motion and rigid structure-from-motion.PloS one · 2026Article
- Individual recognition in a jumping spider (eLife · 2025Article
- Neurogenomic and behavioral principles shape freezing dynamics and synergistic performance in Drosophila melanogaster.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Understanding biological motion through the lens of animate motion processing.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Review
- Through an animal's eye: the implications of diverse sensory systems in scientific experimentation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Eye-specific detection and a multi-eye integration model of biological motion perception.The Journal of experimental biology · 2024Article
- Seeing life in the teeming world: animacy perception in arthropods.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- Background matching can reduce responsiveness of jumping spiders to stimuli in motion.The Journal of experimental biology · 2024Article
- Perception of animate motion in dogs.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- Identifying critical kinematic features of animate motion and contribution to animacy perception.iScience · 2023Article
- Study Replication: Shape Discrimination in a Conditioning Procedure on the Jumping SpiderAnimals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Life is in motion (through a chick's eye).Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Spontaneous preference for unpredictability in the temporal contingencies between agents' motion in naive domestic chicks.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Are prime numbers special? Insights from the life sciences.Biology direct · 2022Review
- Gravity-Dependent Animacy Perception in Zebrafish.Research (Washington, D.C.) · 2022Article
- Humans, fish, spiders and bees inherited working memory and attention from their last common ancestor.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Great apes' understanding of biomechanics: eye-tracking experiments using three-dimensional computer-generated animations.Primates; journal of primatology · 2021Article
- Dynamics of visual reversals from ambiguous spinning biological-motion and rigid structure-from-motion.i-PerceptionArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The body of most creatures is composed of interconnected joints. During motion, the spatial location of these joints changes, but they must maintain their distances to one another, effectively moving semirigidly. This pattern, termed "biological motion" in the literature, can be used as a visual cue, enabling many animals (including humans) to distinguish animate from inanimate objects. Crucially, even artificially created scrambled stimuli, with no recognizable structure but that maintains semirigid movement patterns, are perceived as animated. However, to date, biological motion perception has only been reported in vertebrates. Due to their highly developed visual system and complex visual behaviors, we investigated the capability of jumping spiders to discriminate biological from nonbiological motion using point-light display stimuli. These kinds of stimuli maintain motion information while being devoid of structure. By constraining spiders on a spherical treadmill, we simultaneously presented 2 point-light displays with specific dynamic traits and registered their preference by observing which pattern they turned toward. Spiders clearly demonstrated the ability to discriminate between biological motion and random stimuli, but curiously turned preferentially toward the latter. However, they showed no preference between biological and scrambled displays, results that match responses produced by vertebrates. Crucially, spiders turned toward the stimuli when these were only visible by the lateral eyes, evidence that this task may be eye specific. This represents the first demonstration of biological motion recognition in an invertebrate, posing crucial questions about the evolutionary history of this ability and complex visual processing in nonvertebrate systems.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.