Perceptual Relationships Between Body Shape and  Language

Human body shapes are highly complex, and yet we often use simple words to describe them. How does language relate to body shape? Are simple descriptions sufficient to reconstruct a body shape accurately? We investigate these questions by linking two multivariate similarity spaces — one made from body geometry (3D laser scans), and one made from 27-word descriptions of bodies. We find that the main sources of variance in these two spaces correspond to one another. This allows us to generate bodies from descriptions by translating between low-dimensional spaces, which suggests that a relatively simple description of body shape can accurately represent a full-body shape.

Hill, M. Q., Streuber, S., Hahn, C. A., Black, M. J., & O’Toole, A. J. (2016). Creating body shapes from verbal descriptions by linking similarity spaces. Psychological Science, 27(11), 1486–1497.

Streuber, S. Quiros-Ramirez, M. A., Hill, M.Q., Hahn, C. A., Zuffi, S. O’Toole, A. & Black, M. J. (2016, in press). Body Talk: Crowd-shaping realistic 3D avatars with words. ACM Transactions Graphics (SIGGRAPH), 35, 54:1-54:14.

Hill, M. Q., Streuber, S. Hahn, C. A., Black, M. J., & O’Toole, A. J. (2015). Exploring the relationship between body shapes and descriptions by linking similarity spaces. 12th Annual Meeting of the Vision Science Society, May 2015.

Links to our other projects

Perception and Memory for Human Faces
Face Recognition Comparisons Between Humans and Machines
Functional Neuroimaging of High Level Visual Processing of Human Faces
Analyzing Face Recognition Algorithms
Behavioral and Neural Correlates of Person Recognition
Understanding the Performance of Forensic Facial Identification Experts