The role of human body movements in mate selection

It is common scientific knowledge, that most of what we say within a conversation is not only expressed by the words meaning alone, but also through our gestures, postures, and body movements. This non-verbal mode is possibly rooted firmly in our human evolutionary heritage, and as such, some scientists argue that it serves as a fundamental assessment and expression tool for our inner qualities. Studies of nonverbal communication have established that a universal, culture-free, non-verbal sign system exists, that is available to all individuals for negotiating social encounters. Thus, it is not only the kind of gestures and expressions humans use in social communication, but also the way these movements are performed, as this seems to convey key information about an individuals quality. Dance, for example, is a special form of movement, which can be observed in human courtship displays. Recent research suggests that people are sensitive to the variation in dance movements, and that dance performance provides information about an individuals mate quality in terms of health and strength. This article reviews the role of body movement in human non-verbal communication, and highlights its significance in human mate preferences in order to promote future work in this research area within the evolutionary psychology framework

Recurrent Attention Models for Depth-Based Person Identification

We present an attention-based model that reasons on human body shape and motion dynamics to identify individuals in the absence of RGB information, hence in the dark. Our approach leverages unique 4D spatio-temporal signatures to address the identification problem across days. Formulated as a reinforcement learning task, our model is based on a combination of convolutional and recurrent neural networks with the goal of identifying small, discriminative regions indicative of human identity. We demonstrate that our model produces state-of-the-art results on several published datasets given only depth images. We further study the robustness of our model towards viewpoint, appearance, and volumetric changes. Finally, we share insights gleaned from interpretable 2D, 3D, and 4D visualizations of our model's spatio-temporal attention.Comment: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 201

Audiovisual integration of emotional signals from others' social interactions

Audiovisual perception of emotions has been typically examined using displays of a solitary character (e.g., the face-voice and/or body-sound of one actor). However, in real life humans often face more complex multisensory social situations, involving more than one person. Here we ask if the audiovisual facilitation in emotion recognition previously found in simpler social situations extends to more complex and ecological situations. Stimuli consisting of the biological motion and voice of two interacting agents were used in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with visual, auditory, auditory filtered/noisy, and audiovisual congruent and incongruent clips. We asked participants to judge whether the two agents were interacting happily or angrily. In Experiment 2, another group of participants repeated the same task, as in Experiment 1, while trying to ignore either the visual or the auditory information. The findings from both experiments indicate that when the reliability of the auditory cue was decreased participants weighted more the visual cue in their emotional judgments. This in turn translated in increased emotion recognition accuracy for the multisensory condition. Our findings thus point to a common mechanism of multisensory integration of emotional signals irrespective of social stimulus complexity

Impaired perception of biological motion in Parkinson’s disease

OBJECTIVE: We examined biological motion perception in Parkinson’s disease (PD). Biological motion perception is related to one’s own motor function and depends on the integrity of brain areas affected in PD, including posterior superior temporal sulcus. If deficits in biological motion perception exist, they may be specific to perceiving natural/fast walking patterns that individuals with PD can no longer perform, and may correlate with disease-related motor dysfunction. METHOD: Twenty-six nondemented individuals with PD and 24 control participants viewed videos of point-light walkers and scrambled versions that served as foils, and indicated whether each video depicted a human walking. Point-light walkers varied by gait type (natural, parkinsonian) and speed (0.5, 1.0, 1.5 m/s). Participants also completed control tasks (object motion, coherent motion perception), a contrast sensitivity assessment, and a walking assessment. RESULTS: The PD group demonstrated significantly less sensitivity to biological motion than the control group (p < .001, Cohen’s d = 1.22), regardless of stimulus gait type or speed, with a less substantial deficit in object motion perception (p = .02, Cohen’s d = .68). There was no group difference in coherent motion perception. Although individuals with PD had slower walking speed and shorter stride length than control participants, gait parameters did not correlate with biological motion perception. Contrast sensitivity and coherent motion perception also did not correlate with biological motion perception. CONCLUSION: PD leads to a deficit in perceiving biological motion, which is independent of gait dysfunction and low-level vision changes, and may therefore arise from difficulty perceptually integrating form and motion cues in posterior superior temporal sulcus.Published versio

Motor imagery training improves precision of an upper limb movement in patients with hemiparesis

BACKGROUND: In healthy participants, beneficial effects of motor imagery training on movement execution have been shown for precision, strength, and speed. In the clinical context, it is still debated whether motor imagery provides an effective rehabilitation technique in patients with motor deficits.OBJECTIVE: To compare the effectiveness of two different types of movement training: motor imagery vs. motor execution.METHODS: Twenty-five patients with hemiparesis were assigned to one of two training groups: the imagery or the execution-training group. Both groups completed a baseline test before they received six training sessions, each of which was followed by a test session. Using a novel and precisely quantifiable test, we assessed how accurately patients performed an upper limb movement. RESULTS: Both training groups improved performance over the six test sessions but the improvement was significantly larger in the imagery group. That is, the imagery group was able to perform more precise movements than the execution group after the sixth training session while there was no difference at the beginning of the training.CONCLUSIONS: The results provide evidence for the benefit of motor imagery training in patients with hemiparesis and thus suggest the integration of cognitive training in conventional physiotherapy practice