Because of its importance to human functioning, biological motion has been an increasingly important research topic, drawing attention from researchers in fields such as perception, neuroscience, computer vision, and robotics. Just within the field of perception, biological motion research has been conducted in areas as diverse as animal perception, infant studies, and autism research. For example, biological motion has been employed to investigate humans' sensitivity to communicative and social interactions (Chouchourelou et al.,
2006; Dittrich et al.,
1996; Manera et al.,
2010; Poizner et al.,
1981; Roether et al.,
2009), emotion (Chouchourelou et al.,
2006; Dittrich et al.,
1996; Hubert et al.,
2007; Pollick et al.,
2003; Pollick, Paterson, Bruderlin, & Sanford,
2001), sensitivity to different types of action (Dittrich,
1993; van Boxtel & Lu,
2011), developmental research in children (Carter & Pelphrey,
2006; Fox & McDaniel,
1982; Pelphrey & Carter,
2008) and adults (Norman, Payton, Long, & Hawkes,
2004; Pilz, Bennett, & Sekuler,
2010), sensitivity of animals to biological motion (Herman, Morrel-Samuels, & Pack,
1990; Oram & Perrett,
1994; Regolin, Tommasi, & Vallortigara,
2000), autism spectrum disorder (e.g., Blake, Turner, Smoski, Pozdol, & Stone,
2003; Freitag et al.,
2008; Herrington et al.,
2007; Hubert et al.,
2007; Murphy, Brady, Fitzgerald, & Troje,
2009; Parron et al.,
2008), and contributions of low- and high-level brain areas to visual perception (Chang & Troje,
2009; Hirai & Kakigi,
2008; Thurman & Lu,
2013;
van Boxtel & Lu, 2013). Furthermore, neuroimaging and physiological studies aim to reveal the neurobiological underpinnings of biological motion perception. Significant progress has been made in terms of localizing brain areas specific to biological motion (Grossman et al.,
2000; Oram & Perrett,
1994) and social perception (Iacoboni et al.,
2004), providing evidence for thought-provoking concepts such as “snapshot” neurons (Vangeneugden, Pollick, & Vogels,
2009) and identifying brain (endo-)phenotypes of e.g., autism spectrum disorder (e.g., Freitag et al.,
2008; Herrington et al.,
2007; Hubert et al.,
2007; Kaiser & Pelphrey,
2012).