302
Views
5
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Original Articles

Idiosyncratic body motion influences person recognition

&
Pages 539-549 | Received 27 Jun 2016, Accepted 26 Aug 2016, Published online: 20 Sep 2016
 

ABSTRACT

Person recognition is an important human ability. The main source of information we use to recognize people is the face. However, there is a variety of other information that contributes to person recognition, and the face is almost exclusively perceived in the presence of a moving body. Here, we used recent motion capture and computer animation techniques to quantitatively explore the impact of body motion on person recognition. Participants were familiarized with two animated avatars each performing the same basic sequence of karate actions with slight idiosyncratic differences in the body movements. The body of both avatars was the same, but they differed in their facial identity and body movements. In a subsequent recognition task, participants saw avatars whose facial identity consisted of morphs between the learned individuals. Across trials, each avatar was seen animated with sequences taken from both of the learned movement patterns. Participants were asked to judge the identity of the avatars. The avatars that contained the two original heads were predominantly identified by their facial identity regardless of body motion. More importantly however, participants identified the ambiguous avatar primarily based on its body motion. This clearly shows that body motion can affect the perception of identity. Our results also highlight the importance of taking into account the face in the context of a body rather than solely concentrating on facial information for person recognition.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Martin Giese for providing the motion capture data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Log in via your institution

Log in to Taylor & Francis Online

PDF download + Online access

  • 48 hours access to article PDF & online version
  • Article PDF can be downloaded
  • Article PDF can be printed
USD 53.00 Add to cart

Issue Purchase

  • 30 days online access to complete issue
  • Article PDFs can be downloaded
  • Article PDFs can be printed
USD 238.00 Add to cart

* Local tax will be added as applicable

Related Research

People also read lists articles that other readers of this article have read.

Recommended articles lists articles that we recommend and is powered by our AI driven recommendation engine.

Cited by lists all citing articles based on Crossref citations.
Articles with the Crossref icon will open in a new tab.