Human perception of quadruped motion

In our research we are interested in human sensitivity to differences in animal gaits. We use point light walkers as stimuli, and follow up with a study using a realistic 3D model. Previously it has been shown that humans can regonise human motion, gender and the identity of an actor from a set of moving points [1973; 1977]. McDonnell et al. [2008] show that both shape and motion influence sex perception of virtual human characters. Mather and West [1993] have shown that people can recognise animals from pointlight displays. In order to find out whether we can tell the difference between animals using motion cues, we captured the motion of farm animals.