Biological point-light displays scanning by the principal eyes of a jumping spider

The semi-rigid structure of bodies forces animals to move in rhythmic patterns shared by all creatures with skeletons, exoskeletons, or limb connections. This pattern, known as biological motion, is instantly recognizable and conveys “animacy,” even when body shape is removed and only a cloud of moving dots is shown. The motion alone is so informative that some animals can reconstruct the original shape. Jumping spiders, highly visual arthropods, divide motion detection and shape recognition between their four pairs of eyes. Previous studies showed that they can distinguish biological from non-biological motion using only their anterior lateral eyes, yet seemed unable to extract shape from motion. In this study, we examined how the anterior medial eyes of jumping spiders—which are used for shape recognition—respond to dot clouds depicting biological or non-biological motion. Using a custom eye tracker, we monitored retinal movements during presentation of static and moving stimuli. We found spiders change their retinal shifting pattern based on both the target’s motion (biological or not) and implied structure (i.e., whether dots suggest a coherent shape). These results reveal that jumping spiders analyze motion with more complexity than previously thought, suggesting a deeper integration of motion and form processing within their minuscule, modular brains.