Biological motion is thought to be composed of two types of information, which are the global configuration and local motion (e.g., Troje,
2008). The global configuration is a dynamic structure of the point-light biological motion. This information is believed to give us a vivid impression of a human figure as well as its higher order characteristics. If configural processing of biological motion is disrupted by inverting the display, some perceptions, such as locomotion (Dittrich,
1993; Pavlova & Sokolov,
2000), emotion (Dittrich, Troscianko, Lea, & Morgan,
1996), and gender (Barclay, Cutting, & Kozlowski,
1978), are largely impaired (the inversion effect in biological motion). Functional MRI studies also have shown that the neural substrates of biological motion perception are different when configural processing is disrupted by randomly changing the position of the point-light dots (i.e., scrambled biological motion; Grossman et al.,
2000; Servos, Osu, Santi, & Kawato,
2002). On the other hand, local motion information is carried solely by the motion of the individual point-light dots (i.e., body parts). Several studies have pointed out the importance of local motion features for biological motion perception (Casile & Giese,
2005; Mather, Radford, & West,
1992; Thornton et al.,
1998). Moreover, other studies have shown that humans perform better in motion direction discrimination (Chang & Troje,
2009a; Troje & Westhoff,
2006), animacy detection (Chang & Troje,
2008), and visual search tasks (Wang, Zhang, He, & Jiang,
2010) with an upright scrambled motion display than with an inverted scrambled motion display (the local inversion effect in biological motion). These studies suggest that some biological motion information is preserved in the point-light display even without the global configuration and that local motion information is susceptible to the inversion effect.