Video: A female walking pattern seems to walk away from you, a male comes toward you
It鈥檚 surprisingly easy to tell things like a person鈥檚 gender, age and mood from a computer animation that simply shows the movement of a few key points of the body.
Now it seems that people watching a characteristically male walking pattern also routinely perceive the figure as coming towards them, while a feminine walker seems to be moving away.
at Southern Cross University, Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, Australia and colleagues videoed the gait of about 50 men and 50 women. They isolated the motion of major joints, such as the shoulders, wrists and knees, and used this data to create a series of 鈥減oint-light model鈥� walkers, whose gaits ranged from extremely feminine to extremely masculine.
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鈥淭he very girly girls walk like a prancing pony, lifting their knees right up and putting one foot down in front of the other, while the hulking males have a very rolling gait,鈥� van der Zwan says.
While it鈥檚 not possible from point-light displays to tell whether someone is facing towards you or away from you, the team found that both men and women tended to see the feminine models as walking away, while the males seemed to be coming towards them.
For the median, gender-neutral model, roughly half of the observers judged it to be moving towards them, and half away.
Fight or flight
Even when the team added some perspective cues to the models, to suggest a direction of gait, the perceived gender of the model still had a significant effect on the direction judged by the observers.
The team speculates that there might be evolutionary explanations for their results.
鈥淚f you see a male, but you don鈥檛 have quite enough information to be sure if they鈥檙e facing towards you or away from you,鈥� says van der Zwan, 鈥渋t鈥檚 probably safer to assume they鈥檙e facing you, so you can get ready to fight, or for flight.鈥�
However, it might be more important for young children or infants not to misinterpret a female figure as facing them when in fact she鈥檚 moving away.
鈥淚f you鈥檙e young and you鈥檙e not quite sure if your mother or female carer is facing you or not and she鈥檚 walking, it鈥檚 probably safer to assume she鈥檚 leaving, because then you can get ready to follow her if you need to,鈥� he says.
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