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Abstract

In real life humans need to recognize actions even if the actor is surrounded by a crowd of people but little is known about action recognition in cluttered environments. In the current study, we investigated whether a crowd influences action recognition with an adaptation paradigm. Using life-sized moving stimuli presented on a panoramic display, 16 participants adapted to either a hug or a clap action and subsequently viewed an ambiguous test stimulus (a morph between both adaptors). The task was to categorize the test stimulus as either ‘clap’ or ‘hug’. The change in perception of the ambiguous action due to adaptation is referred to as an ‘adaptation aftereffect’. We tested the influence of a cluttered background (a crowd of people) on the adaptation aftereffect under three experimental conditions: ‘no crowd’, ‘static crowd’ and ‘moving crowd’. Additionally, we tested the adaptation effect at 0° and 40° eccentricity. Participants showed a significant adaptation aftereffect at both eccentricities (p < .001). The results reveal that the presence of a crowd (static or moving) has no influence on the action adaptation effect (p = .07), neither in central vision nor in peripheral vision. Our results suggest that action recognition mechanisms and action adaptation aftereffects are robust even in complex and distracting environments.