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Abstract

Studies of biological motion typically ask observers to make a direct judgement on some aspect of a centrally attended walker. For example, observers may be asked to judge which direction the figure is facing, or whether there figure appears to be male or female. In the current paper I will present a series of studies that assess the impact of to-be-ignored walkers on a variety of tasks. In
one task, a modification of the Eriksen flanker paradigm, we assess how peripheral walkers affect the processing of a central target walker. In another study, the main task is simply to judge whether random dot patches are in or out of phase with each other. We examine performance in this task as a function of whether irrelevant walking figures face the same direction as the moving dot patterns. In both sets of studies we find evidence that task-irrelevant figures cannot be ignored and are processed to a level where their apparent direction influences the primary task. We discuss these results in the context of the possible mechanisms that might underlie biological motion processing.