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A predisposition for biological motion in the newborn baby.

ABSTRACT: An inborn predisposition to attend to biological motion has long been theorized, but had so far been demonstrated only in one animal species (the domestic chicken). In particular, no preference for biological motion was reported for human infants of <3 months of age. We tested 2-day-old babies' discrimination after familiarization and their spontaneous preferences for biological vs. nonbiological point-light animations. Newborns were shown to be able to discriminate between two different patterns of motion (Exp. 1) and, when first exposed to them, selectively preferred to look at the biological motion display (Exp. 2). This preference was also orientation-dependent: newborns looked longer at upright displays than upside-down displays (Exp. 3). These data support the hypothesis that detection of biological motion is an intrinsic capacity of the visual system, which is presumably part of an evolutionarily ancient and nonspecies-specific system predisposing animals to preferentially attend to other animals.

SUBMITTER: Simion F

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2206618 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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A predisposition for biological motion in the newborn baby.

Simion Francesca F Regolin Lucia L Bulf Hermann H

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20080103 2

An inborn predisposition to attend to biological motion has long been theorized, but had so far been demonstrated only in one animal species (the domestic chicken). In particular, no preference for biological motion was reported for human infants of <3 months of age. We tested 2-day-old babies' discrimination after familiarization and their spontaneous preferences for biological vs. nonbiological point-light animations. Newborns were shown to be able to discriminate between two different pattern ...[more]

PMID: 18174333

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Project description:Precise spatiotemporal regulation is the foundation for the healthy development and maintenance of living organisms. All cells must correctly execute their function in the right place at the right time. Cellular motion is thus an important dynamic readout of signaling in key disease-relevant molecular pathways. However despite the rapid advancement of imaging technology, a comprehensive quantitative description of motion imaged under different imaging modalities at all spatiotemporal scales; molecular, cellular and tissue-level is still lacking. Generally, cells move either 'individually' or 'collectively' as a group with nearby cells. Current computational tools specifically focus on one or the other regime, limiting their general applicability. To address this, we recently developed and reported a new computational framework, Motion Sensing Superpixels (MOSES). Incorporating the individual advantages of single cell trackers for individual cell and particle image velocimetry (PIV) for collective cell motion analyses, MOSES enables 'mesoscale' analysis of both single-cell and collective motion over arbitrarily long times. At the same time, MOSES readily complements existing single-cell tracking workflows with additional characterization of global motion patterns and interaction analysis between cells and also operates directly on PIV extracted motion fields to yield rich motion trajectories analogous for single-cell tracks suitable for high-throughput motion phenotyping. This protocol provides a step-by-step practical guide for those interested in applying MOSES to their own datasets. The protocol highlights the salient features of a MOSES analysis and demonstrates the ease-of-use and wide applicability of MOSES to biological imaging through demo experimental analyses with ready-to-use code snippets of four datasets from different microscope modalities; phase-contrast, fluorescent, lightsheet and intra-vital microscopy. In addition we discuss critical points of consideration in the analysis.

Dataset Information

A predisposition for biological motion in the newborn baby.

Publications

A predisposition for biological motion in the newborn baby.

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