Determining the point of subjective ambiguity of ambiguous biological-motion figures with perspective cues

Orthographic frontal/back projections of biological-motion figures are bistable: The point-light figure in principle can be perceived either as facing toward the viewer or as facing away from the viewer. Some point-light actions-for example, walking-elicit a strong "facing bias": Despite the absence of objective cues to depth, observers tend to interpret the figure as facing toward the viewer in most of the cases. In this article, we present and experimentally validate a technique that affords full experimental control of the perceived in-depth orientation of point-light figures. We demonstrate that by parametrically manipulating the amount of perspective information in the stimulus, it is possible to obtain any desired level of subjective ambiguity. Directions for future research, in which this technique can be fruitfully implemented, are suggested. Program code of a demo is provided that can be modified easily for program code of new experiments. The demo and QuickTime movie files illustrating our perspective manipulation technique may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.