A central role of visual attention is to generate object descriptions that are not available from early vision. Simple examples are counting elements in a display or deciding whether a dot is inside or outside a closed contour. The present authors are interested in the high-level descriptions of dynamic patterns--the motions that characterize familiar objects undergoing stereotypical action--such as a pencil bouncing on a table top, a butterfly in flight, or a closing door. They examined whether the perception of these action patterns is mediated by attention as a high-level animation or 'sprite.' The authors studied the discrimination of displays made up of simple, rigidly linked sets of points in motion: either pairs of points in orbiting motion or 11 points in biological motion mimicking human walking. It was found that discrimination of even the simplest dynamic patterns demands attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

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