Biological motion is a crucial stimulus with social and survival
value that can be processed incidentally. However, no study
has examined the factors that would affect bottom-up
processing of biological motion in depth. In this study, we
investigated the effect of perceptual load and eccentricity on
biological motion perception. Human subjects performed a
letter search task at the center while biological motion in the
form of point-light displays was displayed as a distractor in the
periphery. We manipulated the perceptual load at the center as
well as the eccentricity of the distractor stimuli in the
periphery. Our results show that when the perceptual load is
low, people are distracted more by biological motion at near
eccentricities, whereas when the load is high, the position of
the distractor does not have any effect. In sum, these results
suggest that bottom-up perception of biological motion is
influenced by perceptual load and eccentricity.