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Psychology of Gait and Action Recognition

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Biometrics

  • 172 Accesses

Synonyms

Action categorization; Action understanding; Biological motion perception

Definition

The psychology of gait and action recognition strives to understand the processes that underlie how people detect, recognize and understand the movements of others. Since gait is a fundamental human activity, it has formed an important visual signal for psychologists to examine. Experiments have shown that sparse representations of gait support the recognition of identity, gender, and emotion by observers even when viewing conditions are degraded. The study of gait and action recognition focuses on several questions, including: what visual properties uniquely specify human movement; how to quantify human performance in action recognition; and the neural mechanisms that form the basis of decoding human movement.

Introduction

The modern study of the psychology of human movement, in particular the perception of gait, starts with the work of the Swedish Psychologist Gunnar Johansson in the 1970s [

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Frank E. Pollick

Authors
  1. Frank E. Pollick
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Biometrics and Security Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Stan Z. Li (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Departments of Computer Science & Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Anil Jain (Professor) (Professor)

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Pollick, F.E. (2009). Psychology of Gait and Action Recognition. In: Li, S.Z., Jain, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Biometrics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73003-5_34

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