Movement to Mind
Human Movement · Social information · ComputationaL social information processing
The research program of Mark Jaime, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Psychology · Indiana University Columbus
Movement to Mind examines human movement as a continuously unfolding source of psychological and social information. Rather than describing behavior only in terms of recognizable actions—such as reaching, walking, gesturing, or smiling—the program focuses on how those actions are organized as they unfold. Variation in timing, trajectory, kinematics, moment-to-moment variability, and coordination constitutes what is referred to as movement microstructure.
This research asks what movement microstructure may express about the person producing it, how perceivers become sensitive to and use that structure, and how computer vision can make these patterns available for psychological study. The approach treats computer vision as more than a tool for tracking the body or reproducing conventional physical measures of movement. Digitized movement can preserve socially meaningful structure in its own right, and when that structure reliably relates to characteristics of the actor or interaction, it provides a legitimate level of psychological analysis even when it does not map directly onto an established biomechanical measure.
Research Aims
Movement Microstructure as an Expression of the Person
To ask whether patterned variation in how people move is systematically related to the person producing it. The focus is on relationships between movement organization and internal psychological states, social functioning, and neurodevelopmental variation.
Movement Microstructure as Social Information
To examines how perceivers become sensitive to the organization of another person’s movement and how that information contributes to social perception and inference. The central question is not simply what action is being performed, but how differences in how an action unfolds shape what becomes perceptually available about the person, their state, intentions, and the social situation.
Movement Microstructure as a Digital Signal
To examine whether psychologically relevant movement organization can be recovered from digitized representations of human movement. This work asks which spatiotemporal, kinematic, micro-dynamic, and relational properties remain informative when movement is represented computationally, and whether those properties provide reliable indicators of variation in the actor or interaction.
Current Work
Facial Movement Microstructure and Social Functioning
Current Indiana University-funded research is developing an experimental-grade, web-based platform for remotely studying facial movement dynamics under controlled task conditions. The platform combines structured experimental presentation with built-in video acquisition and quality-control criteria—including minimum recording quality, facial visibility, and head-pose requirements—to support reliable computational analysis outside the traditional laboratory. The project examines whether fine-grained patterns of facial movement are systematically related to social functioning across a broad range of neurodevelopmental variation, with the longer-term goal of developing scalable, objective behavioral indicators of social functioning.
Project collaborators: Gregory F. Lewis, Ph.D., Intelligent Systems Engineering, Indiana University Bloomington; Mohammad Aghajani, Graduate Researcher, Intelligent Systems Engineering, Indiana University Bloomington.
Neural Processing of Movement in Social Facial Information
This EEG/ERP study examines the contribution of movement itself to the processing of socially meaningful facial information. Facial point-light displays substantially reduce conventional appearance cues while preserving dynamic information sufficient for emotion perception, providing a useful means of isolating the role of movement within a social stimulus (Bidet-Ildei et al., 2020). The experiment compares continuously unfolding expressions with static and temporally degraded dynamic conditions to determine how event-related potentials are affected when movement information is preserved, reduced, or disrupted. The broader aim is to identify the neural processes specifically associated with perceiving movement within dynamic social expression. This work is being conducted in collaboration with student researcher Issiah Leonbruno.
Example facial point-light display from the PLAViMoP database (Decatoire et al., 2018; Bidet-Ildei et al., 2022).
Student collaborator: Issiah Leonbruno, Undergraduate Researcher, Psychology, Indiana University Columbus.
Selected Publications
A selection of work tracing the development of the Movement to Mind research program across movement production, perception, and the development of movement-based self and social understanding.
Affective meaning from unlabeled biological motion: Associations with social–perceptual sensitivity
Jaime, M., & daSilva, E. B. (2026). PLoS ONE, 21(8), e0352873.
Examines how perceivers derive affective meaning from human movement when contextual and categorical emotion cues are minimized. Greater social–perceptual sensitivity was associated with affective judgments more closely aligned with the organization of the observed movement, highlighting the interaction between movement structure and the perceiver.
Level of autistic traits in neurotypical adults predicts kinematic idiosyncrasies in their biological movements
Lewis, G. F., daSilva, E. B., Aghajani, M., Date, S., & Jaime, M. (2024). Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 18.
Examines how the organization of emotional body movement varies systematically with autistic traits, providing an empirical foundation for studying movement microstructure as an expression of the person producing it.
Visual discrimination of delayed self-generated movement reveals the temporal limit of proprioceptive–visual intermodal integration
Jaime, M., O’Driscoll, K., & Moore, C. (2016). Consciousness and Cognition, 43, 27–37.
Investigates sensitivity to the temporal relationship between self-generated movement and its visual consequences, contributing to a developmental account of movement, perception, and self-awareness.
Developmental changes in the visual–proprioceptive integration threshold of children
Jaime, M., Longard, J., & Moore, C. (2014). Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 125, 1–12.
Examines how sensitivity to relations between seen and felt movement changes across development and establishes an early foundation for the program’s focus on movement-based perceptual organization.
About
Mark Jaime, Ph.D.
I am an Associate Professor of Psychology at Indiana University Columbus. My research examines the organization and perception of human movement and its relationship to psychological variation and social understanding. My work spans social perception, developmental science, neurodevelopment, and cognitive neuroscience, using approaches that include behavioral experimentation, EEG/ERP, biological-motion paradigms, computer vision, and computational analysis. Across these approaches, a central goal is to understand movement as a psychologically meaningful level of organization and to develop new ways of observing and measuring the structure that becomes available as people move.
Movement to Mind brings these lines of work together as an integrated research program focused on the relationship between movement, the person producing it, and the perceiver interpreting it.
Contact
Mark Jaime, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Psychology
Indiana University Columbus