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Abstract

Anticipating future actions is clearly adaptive. Several lines of behavioural and physiological research have indicated that such anticipatory mechanisms may be a fundamental feature of our visual system. Here, we used one such behavioural paradigm -- representational momentum (Freyd and Finke, 1984 Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 10 126 - 132) -- to explore anticipation of human motion in complex video images. Digital video clips of crowds (more than ten people) were filmed in and around a major German city. The clips depicted activities such as exiting a train, browsing in a store, walking through a market place. Such stimuli differ from those generally used to explore representational momentum, as they contain meaningful, complex, real (rather than implied) motion. On each trial observers saw a brief (400 ms) inducing sequence taken from a random position within a 10 s video clip. Immediately after the inducing display the screen went blank for 250 ms and observers tried to remember the stopping point. A same/different response was then made to a probe image which was either identical to the stopping point or varied by ±40, ±80, or ±120 ms. As in previous studies with less complex displays, observers consistently misremembered the stopping point forward rather than backward of the true stopping point.