visually inexperienced chicks exhibit spontaneous preference for biological motion patterns视觉经验的小鸡表现出自发的对生物运动模式的偏好.pdfVIP

Open access, freely available online PLoS BIOLOGY Visually Inexperienced Chicks Exhibit Spontaneous Preference for Biological Motion Patterns 1* 2 2 Giorgio Vallortigara , Lucia Regolin , Fabio Marconato 1 Department of Psychology and B.R.A.I.N. Centre for Neuroscience, University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy, 2 Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, Padova, Italy When only a small number of points of light attached to the torso and limbs of a moving organism are visible, the animation correctly conveys the animal’s activity. Here we report that newly hatched chicks, reared and hatched in darkness, at their first exposure to point-light animation sequences, exhibit a spontaneous preference to approach biological motion patterns. Intriguingly, this predisposition is not specific for the motion of a hen, but extends to the pattern of motion of other vertebrates, even to that of a potential predator such as a cat. The predisposition seems to reflect the existence of a mechanism in the brain aimed at orienting the young animal towards objects that move semi- rigidly (as vertebrate animals do), thus facilitating learning, i.e., through imprinting, about their more specific features of motion. Citation: Vallortigara G, Regolin L, Marconato F (2005) Visually inexperienced chicks exhibit spontaneous preference for biological motion patterns. PLoS Biol 3(7): e208. Introduction point-light animation sequences. However, this tells us nothing about any possible natural predisposition of the It has long been known in the literature on imprinting [1,2], animals to attend prefer