Still, the confusion between close gestures at recognition stage has showed that the structural aspects of the motion are necessary to discriminate actions whose body parts coordination and correlation are similar.
The goal of the current study was to determine which spatial frequencies carry the most diagnostic information for discriminating actions.
The ideal observer was able to discriminate actions at all band-pass filter levels, so information was clearly available in all SF bands to perform the task.
The results of this experiment shed light on the spatial scale of diagnostic features for biological motion perception and allow us to quantitatively compare human efficiency for discriminating actions to previous estimates of efficiency for discriminating other types of objects.
However, a potentially critical factor in discriminating actions that you might have performed from those you merely imagined may be "reality monitoring" (Johnson & Raye, 1981), an ability thought to involve an assessment of the qualitative characteristics of memory representations.
In fact observer performance discriminating actions in the first SF band during the practice block, which contained no noise, was only 77% on average (SD = 12%), so it was not surprising that observers failed to reach threshold with the s/n levels used.
The gravest, most enduring damage has been done to American self-identity and the country's capacity for somber, discriminating action -- as opposed to disjointed, aimless flailing.
Another goal of the current experiment was to estimate human efficiency discriminating action videos to compare to efficiency estimates for other object types.
We performed Monte Carlo simulations testing the accuracy of the ideal observer discriminating action videos that were filtered in each of the same six SF bands and masked with identically filtered Gaussian noise at a variety of s/n levels.
After discriminating action potentials according to amplitude, they were digitalized as transistor transistor logic pulses and stored in a laboratory PC with a temporal resolution of 1 ms (data acquisition software "korr," Happy Mutants Bio Corporation ,Ltd, Mainz, Germany).
