2012年1月3日，中科院心理研究所蒋毅课题组在美国科学院院刊PNAS上发表最新研究论文"Life motion signals lengthen perceived temporal duration"，研究人员利用时距分辨任务发现生物运动信息能够延长时距知觉，并且这种时距延长效应与生物运动的整体形状信息以及观察者的主观意识无关。
研究表明生物运动具有区别于非生物运动的时间编码特性，揭示了有可能存在一个特殊的专门针对生物运动信息加工的时间编码机制，有助于人类预测其他生物体的行动从而能更好地适应环境。
精细尺度范围内时间信息（数百毫秒到数秒）的知觉加工对人类日常活动有着至关重要的作用，然而关于它的加工机制仍是一个未解之谜。
研究采用光点生物运动刺激(point-light biological motion)，即运动信息仅是由附着在人或者动物的头部和一些重要关节上的光点运动组成。结果显示，在物理呈现时间相等的情况下，观察者知觉到的正立生物运动刺激的呈现时间要长于倒立的控制运动刺激。有趣的是，对于观察者不熟悉的局部生物运动刺激（将生物运动的整体形状信息完全置乱仅保留局部运动信息）也存在同样的时距延长效应，而当去除生物运动中所包含的生物特征时，该效应完全消失，这表明所观察到的时间知觉的延长效应是由生物运动本身的生物特性所诱发。
该研究受国家重点基础研究发展计划，国家自然科学基金，中科院“百人计划”项目，中科院心理研究所科研启动经费以及中科院心理健康重点实验室经费的资助。（生物谷Bioon.com）
doi:10.1073/pnas.1115515109
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Life motion signals lengthen perceived temporal duration.
Wang L, Jiang Y.
Point-light biological motions, conveying various different attributes of biological entities, have particular spatiotemporal properties that enable them to be processed with remarkable efficiency in the human visual system. Here we demonstrate that such signals automatically lengthen their perceived temporal duration independent of global configuration and without observers' subjective awareness of their biological nature. By using a duration discrimination paradigm, we showed that an upright biological motion sequence was perceived significantly longer than an inverted but otherwise identical sequence of the same duration. Furthermore, this temporal dilation effect could be extended to spatially scrambled biological motion signals, whose global configurations were completely disrupted, regardless of whether observers were aware of the nature of the stimuli. However, such an effect completely disappeared when critical biological characteristics were removed. Taken together, our findings suggest a special mechanism of time perception tuned to life motion signals and shed new light on the temporal encoding of biological motion.
