EC, who has an extensive right ventral lesion, with a clear sparing of her V3A and parietal cortex, was impaired in all motion perception tasks tested.
Psychophysical studies on biological motion perception allow us to test dysfunction at the perceptual levels in this system [7], [8].
We therefore tested whether motion perception was necessary for the aftereffect.
In the current study, we tested biological motion perception using PLDs depicting whole body movements.
While identity processing was not the focus of these latter studies, these observations do suggest that further research exploring possible relationships between performance on tests of biological motion perception and both emotional and behavioral outcomes in preterm children is warranted.
In agreement with earlier observations (Pavlova et al., 2003, 2005; Pavlova, Sokolov, et al., 2006, 2008; Taylor et al., 2009), we found that children born prematurely at VLBW exhibited problems on tests of biological motion perception that require the extraction of motion-mediated body structure.
Our preterm and full-term samples were well matched on several key demographic variables (parental education, family income) and with respect to gender, handedness, and estimated intelligence, making it unlikely that the difficulties preterm children experienced on the tests of biological motion perception were related to these variables.
The test software for motion perception was custom-developed for these experiments and consists of two separate modules, one for stimulus generation and another for running the actual test program.
Additional, exploratory analyses assessed the relationship between scores on each test of biological motion perception and scores on the fives subscales of the AQ (Social Skills, Attention Switching, Attention to Detail, Communication, and Imagination).
