Roles of global configuration and local motion in beat synchronization with biological motion

Experiment 1 shows that the synchronization stability during overall configuration maintenance is significantly higher than that during configuration destruction; After configuration disruption, the biological disruption or maintenance of local motion direction has no significant impact on synchronous stability. Experiment 2, under the premise of configuration destruction, compared three local motion states and found that regardless of the biological direction of destruction or the variable speed biological state, there was no significant difference in synchronous stability compared to the condition of preserving local motion biological state.

Experiment 3 reveals the interaction: when the configuration is complete, the disruption of local motion variability significantly reduces synchronous stability; When the configuration is disrupted, there is no difference in the synchronous performance between the preservation or disruption of local motion biology. The results support the Bayesian mechanism of "global prior local likelihood matching": the humanoid configuration activates the biological motion template as a strong prior.

When the local motion maintains biological properties, the likelihood matches the prior, the prediction error is small, the perceived motion timing load is reduced, and synchronization is the most stable; When the overall configuration is disrupted, a strong prior cannot be established, and the brain is insensitive to local motor biology. Therefore, regardless of whether local biology is maintained or not, synchronous performance tends to converge.

Research has shown that the overall configuration dominates prior generation, while local biological properties only regulate sensory motor timing when prior is present, providing new evidence for the hierarchical processing mechanism of biological motor perception.