Neural Mechanism of the Biological Motion Perception

The perception of biological motion is crucial for the survival of human beings.By examining the neural mechanism of biological motion perception,it is helpful to understand how people communicate at a distance and learn of complex motor actions by imitation.The neural network comprising superior temporal sulcus,fusiform gyrus,lingual gyrus and middle temporal area might be the potential neural basis of biological motion perception.Other brain areas,such as amygdala,cerebellum,premotor cortex and extrastriate body areas may also be involved in the processing of biological motion.The hierarchical neural model and template-matching model were proposed to explain the key experimental results and new experiments were designed relating to the recognition of biological movements.The paper also points to issues that cannot be answered by these two models and by the existing experimental results.