Walk This Way? Masculine Motion Seems To Come At You, While Females Walk Away

[Guest guest]

Walk This Way? Masculine Motion Seems To Come At You, While Females

Walk Away

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/120798.php

You can tell a lot about people from the way they move alone: their

gender, age, and even their mood, earlier studies have shown. Now,

researchers reporting in the September 9th issue of Current Biology,

a Cell Press publication, have found that observers perceive

masculine motion as coming toward them, while a characteristically

feminine walk looks like it's headed the other way.

Such studies are done by illuminating only the joints of model

walkers and asking observers to identify various characteristics

about the largely ambiguous figures.

" It's a really interesting thing, " said Rick van der Zwan of Southern

Cross University in Australia. " If you look at someone with just

their joints illuminated when they aren't moving, it's difficult to

tell what it is you are looking at. But as soon as they move,

instantaneously, you can tell that it's a person and perceive their

nature. You can tell if it's a boy or a girl, young or old, angry or

happy.… You can discern all these qualities about their state,

affect, and actions with no cues at all about what they look like -

with no form at all, just motion. "

Many previous studies of biological motion perception have relied on

male figures as models, van der Zwan said. One of those earlier

studies had noticed an interesting phenomenon: even though you can't

really tell whether a so-called point-light figure is facing toward

you or away, people seemed to perceive those figures always as facing

in their direction.

Now, van der Zwan and his colleagues show that this isn't always

true.

In their study, they allowed people to observe point-light figures

representing a continuum from an extremely " girly girl " to a " hulking

male. " At the halfway point in between was a gender-neutral walker

that observers judged as male half the time and female half the time.

Their results showed that walking male figures did indeed appear to

face toward you. Female figures, on the other hand, seemed as though

they faced away. The results are the first to show a link between the

perception of gender from biological motion cues and the perception

of orientation.

That same pattern emerged regardless of the gender of the person

watching, a finding that van der Zwan considers an important clue

about the behavior.

" Our data suggest that biological motion is an important cue for

social organisms trying to operate in environments where other cues

as to the actions or intentions of other organisms may be ambiguous, "

the researchers wrote. " Whilst the precise role of local cues in

mediating these effects requires further explication, it is tempting

to speculate that the orientation biases reported here reflect the

development of perceptual mechanisms that weigh in the probable cost

of misinterpreting the actions and intentions of others. For example,

a male figure that is otherwise ambiguous might best be perceived as

approaching to allow the observer to prepare to flee or fight.

Similarly, for observers, and especially infants, the departure of

females might signal also a need to act, but for different reasons. "