Social Vision of the Body in Motion: Interactions Between the Perceiver and the Perceived

The human body reliably conveys meaningful information to observers. Some factors originate in the target of perception. These include states aspects of body shape and also dynamic aspects of body motionBody motion. The perception of bodies in motion also relies on factors that originate in the perceiver, including extant knowledge structures (e.g., stereotypesStereotypes and prior experiences) that influence the decoding of phenotypic cues. This chapter will review three distinct questions. First, how the visible cues of targets of perception and a perceiver’s prior knowledge interact and bias the perception of dynamic body cues in the target, specifically as they relate to emotion perceptionEmotion perception. Second, how such patterns also exert a meaningful influence on the performance of identities, with a specific emphasis on how gendered body motionBody motions impact judgments of sexual orientationSexual orientation. Finally, we review evidence of how targets of perception strategically alter their movements to engender desirable perceptions in observers, with an emphasis on how people strategically alter their gait to appear more attractive to observers. Collectively, these findings highlight the importance of understanding both how cues convey information to observers and how observers’ prior experiences and knowledge structures can bias their perceptions.