Walk This Way: Approaching Bodies Can Influence the Processing of Faces

A highly familiar type of movement occurs whenever a person walks towards you. In the present study, we investigated whether this type of motion has an effect on face processing. ...... Observers were significantly faster in responding to a target face that followed an approach sequence, compared to both receding and static primes. In a second series of experiments, we investigated long-term effects of motion using a delayed visual search paradigm. .... observers were faster at responding to faces that had been learned in the context of an approach sequence. .... these results suggest that the context of a moving body influences face processing, and support the hypothesis that our visual system has mechanisms that aid the encoding of behaviourally-relevant and familiar dynamic events....