Abstract
While research on the perception of line drawings has long demonstrated the importance of contours in object recognition, recent work shows that contours can also convey material properties. For example, even simple 2D shapes with varying contours have been shown to evoke vivid impressions of different materials. However, such static representations capture only a single moment in time. When a material moves, its contours shift, evolve, or deform over time, creating contour motion. Does this contour motion convey diagnostic information about material properties, independent of surface appearance? Existing studies on the role of dynamic cues in material perception either use fully rendered 3D stimuli, where contour motion is confounded with rich surface information, or motion-only displays (dynamic dot stimuli or noise patches), which eliminate surface cues but also lack clearly defined contours. As a result, the relative contribution of contour motion to material perception remains unclear. To address this gap, we measured how human observers perceive materials from dynamic line drawings (“line”), compared to animations of fully textured stimuli that carry optical and motion information (“full”), as well as dynamic dot stimuli (“dot”). Stimuli were three rendered versions (full, dot, line) of material animations from five material categories (jelly, liquid, smoke, fabric, and rigid-breakable). In one experiment, participants rated five material attributes (dense, flexible, wobbly, fluid, airy motion), and in a second experiment, participants were asked to choose one of the two materials that is more similar to a third material across all possible combinations. Results from both experiments consistently show that perceptual organization in both line and dot conditions strongly corresponds to that observed in the full condition. A control rating experiment with static line drawings (single images) showed significantly weaker correspondence to the full condition than between dynamic line drawings and the full condition, indicating that contour motion, not static shape alone, drives the effect. Together, these findings show that contour motion provides diagnostic information for material perception by jointly conveying contour shape and its time-varying dynamics, extending beyond what can be inferred from static contour cues alone. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1038/s41598-026-46015-w.