Something in the way she moves: biological motion, body shape, and attractiveness in women

Morrison, Edward R.; Bain, Hannah; Pattison, Louise; Whyte-Smith, Hannah

doi:10.1080/13506285.2018.1471560

Cited by 6 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Although these PLDs are highly impoverished (e.g., clothes and head cues are absent), once in motion they can be rapidly recognized as coherent, meaningful movements. Critically, multiple aspects of social information, such as identity, walking direction, sex, attractiveness, interaction, intention, and emotion can be extracted from PLDs during visual perception (e.g., Alaerts, Nackaerts, Meyns, Swinnen, & Wenderoth, 2011;Atkinson, Dittrich, Gemmell, & Young, 2004;Loula, Prasad, Harber, & Shiffrar, 2005;Manera, Schouten, Becchio, Bara, & Verfaillie, 2010;Morrison, Hannah, Louise, & Hannah, 2018;Pollick, Lestou, Ryu, & Cho, 2002;Rizzolatti, Fogassi & Gallese, 2001;Roether, Omlor, Christensen, & Giese, 2009;van Boxtel & Lu, 2012; for reviews, see Blakemore, 2008;Sokolov et al, 2012;Troje, 2013). Therefore, the ability to retain these BMs in working memory (WM), which is a postperceptual buffer storing and manipulating a limited set of information for ongoing tasks (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974), plays a pivotal role in our normal social interactions (Urgolites & Wood, 2013), and is perhaps one of the most sophisticated forms of memory processing in the brain (Ding, Gao, & Shen, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agent identity drives adaptive encoding of biological motion into working memory

et al. 2019

Journal of Vision

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To engage in normal social interactions, we have to encode human biological motions (BMs, e.g., walking and jumping), which is one of the most salient and biologically significant types of kinetic information encountered in everyday life, into working memory (WM). Critically, each BM in real life is produced by a distinct person, carrying a dynamic motion signature (i.e., identity). Whether agent identity influences the WM processing of BMs remains unknown. Here, we addressed this question by examining whether memorizing BMs with different identities promoted the WM processing of task-irrelevant clothing colors. Two opposing hypotheses were tested: (a) WM only stores the target action (element-based hypothesis) and (b) WM stores both action and irrelevant clothing color (event-based hypothesis), interpreting each BM as an event. We required participants to memorize actions that either performed by one agent or distinct agents, while ignoring clothing colors. Then we examined whether the irrelevant color was also stored in WM by probing a distracting effect: If the color was extracted into WM, the change of irrelevant color in the probe would lead to a significant distracting effect on action performance. We found that WM encoding of BMs was adaptive: Once the memorized actions had different identities, WM adopted an event-based encoding mode regardless of memory load and probe identity (Experiment 1, different-identity group of Experiment 2, and Experiment 3). However, WM used an elementbased encoding mode when memorized-actions shared the same identity (same-identity group of Experiment 2) or were inverted (Experiment 4). Overall, these findings imply that agent identity information has a significant effect on the WM processing of BMs.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agent identity drives adaptive encoding of biological motion into working memory

et al. 2019

Journal of Vision

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“…For example, facial expressions are more easily recognized when presented as dynamic stimuli compared to still images (Martinez et al, 2016). Both static and dynamic cues are used to judge the attractiveness of women (Morrison et al, 2018). The dynamic nature of the PLD stimuli is one of their strength: sexual suggestiveness can be captured in simple movement cues.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Without any other information about the person, participants are also able to reliably infer personality traits (Thoresen et al, 2012), intentions (Sebanz and Shiffrar, 2009), vulnerability (Gunns et al, 2002), gender (Kozlowski and Cutting, 1977;Mather and Murdoch, 1994) and sexual orientation (Johnson et al, 2007) of the PLD. Finally, attractiveness ratings of womenbased walking PLD are highly correlated to those based on videos (Morrison et al, 2018) underscoring the importance of movement in such judgments.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

“I Like the Way You Move”: Validating the Use of Point-Light Display Animations in Virtual Reality as a Methodology for Manipulating Levels of Sexualization in the Study of Sexual Objectification

Nolet

Viel

Bouchard

2021

Front. Virtual Real.

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Sexual objectification of others has seen a growing research interest in recent years. While promising, the field lacks standardized stimuli, resulting in a confusion between sexualization and sexual objectification, which limits the interpretability of published results. In this study, we propose to use point-light display (PLD) as a novel methodology for manipulating sexualization levels as a first step toward isolating movement from other visual cues (e.g., clothing or physical appearance) for studying effects of sexual objectification of others. To do so, we first developed 8 virtual reality animations varying on 3 dimensions: 1) nature of movement (dance vs. walk), 2) level of sexualization (low vs. high), and 3) animation speed (slow and fast). Then, we validated these stimuli with perception ratings from 211 participants via an online survey. Using mixed linear regression models, we found evidence that our manipulation was successful: while participants took longer, were less accurate, and less confident in their response when confronted with a dancing, sexualized PLD, they also rated it as significantly more sexualized. This latter effect was stronger for participants perceiving a woman dancing compared to participants who perceived other genders. Overall, participants who reported more frequent sexual objectification behaviors also perceived the animations as more sexualized. Taken together, these results suggest that sexual suggestiveness can be manipulated by rather simple movement cues, thus validating the use of PLD as a stepping stone to systematically study processes of sexual objectification. From there, it is now possible to manipulate other variables more precisely during immersions in virtual reality, whether by adding a skin to the animated skeleton, by situating the PLD into different context, by varying the amplitude and the nature of the movements, or by modifying the context of the virtual environment.

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“…And what about gait itself? Intriguingly, men find it sexually alluring when women swing their hips while women find the strutting of broad-shouldered men to be attractive (Morrison et al 2018, Swami et al 2007. Could strutting, broad shoulders, and swinging hips be related to our attraction to bipedal ability?…”

Section: Response To Refereementioning

confidence: 99%

The sexual selection of hominin bipedalism

Dale

2018

IEE

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In this article, I advance a novel hypothesis on the evolution of hominin bipedalism. I begin by arguing extensively for how the transition to bipedalism must have been problematic for hominins during the Neogene. Due to this and the fact that no other primate has made the unusual switch to bipedalism, it seems likely that the selection pressure towards bipedalism was unusually strong. With this in mind, I briefly lay out some of the most promising hypotheses on the evolutionary origin of hominin bipedalism and show how most, if not all, fail in the face of the need for an unusually strong selection pressure. For example, some hypotheses maintain that hominins became bipedal so they could use their hands for carrying infants, food, or other valuable objects. But extant apes are able to carry objects in one of their front limbs (while walking with the other three), and thus it does not seem plausible that our hominin ancestors went through the troublesome transition to bipedalism just so they could carry objects a little more efficiently. After I show that past hypotheses are wanting in the face of this challenge, I argue that there is only one selection pressure powerful enough to instigate a strange and problematic evolutionary adaptation like bipedalism, and that is sexual selection. Specifically, from the fact that bipedal locomotion is an important strategy for intimidating others and ascending the dominance hierarchy in extant apes, I argue that for no particular selective reason bipedal locomotion became a signal for high fitness (much as a large and intricate tail became a signal for high fitness for peahens), and this led to the trait being continuously reinforced in spite of all its deleterious fitness consequences.

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Something in the way she moves: biological motion, body shape, and attractiveness in women

Cited by 6 publications

References 30 publications

Agent identity drives adaptive encoding of biological motion into working memory

Agent identity drives adaptive encoding of biological motion into working memory

“I Like the Way You Move”: Validating the Use of Point-Light Display Animations in Virtual Reality as a Methodology for Manipulating Levels of Sexualization in the Study of Sexual Objectification

The sexual selection of hominin bipedalism

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