title: Creating Body Shapes From Verbal Descriptions by Linking Similarity Spaces.
abstract: Brief verbal descriptions of people's bodies (e.g., "curvy," "long-legged") can elicit vivid mental images. The ease with which these mental images are created belies the complexity of three-dimensional body shapes. We explored the relationship between body shapes and body descriptions and showed that a small number of words can be used to generate categorically accurate representations of three-dimensional bodies. The dimensions of body-shape variation that emerged in a language-based similarity space were related to major dimensions of variation computed directly from three-dimensional laser scans of 2,094 bodies. This relationship allowed us to generate three-dimensional models of people in the shape space using only their coordinates on analogous dimensions in the language-based description space. Human descriptions of photographed bodies and their corresponding models matched closely. The natural mapping between the spaces illustrates the role of language as a concise code for body shape that captures perceptually salient global and local body features.
authors.affiliation: School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas matthew.hill@utdallas.edu.
authors.forename: Matthew Q
authors.initials: MQ
authors.lastname: Hill
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Stephan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Streuber
authors.affiliation: School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas.
authors.forename: Carina A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Hahn
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Michael J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Black
authors.affiliation: School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas.
authors.forename: Alice J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: O'Toole
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000066499:Facial Recognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D018594:Human Body; D006801:Humans; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: face perception; human body; open data; visual perception