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Height and body mass influence on human body outlines: A quantitative approach using an elliptic Fourier analysis
Author(s) -
Courtiol Alexandre,
Ferdy Jean Baptiste,
Godelle Bernard,
Raymond Michel,
Claude Julien
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
american journal of physical anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.146
H-Index - 119
eISSN - 1096-8644
pISSN - 0002-9483
DOI - 10.1002/ajpa.21187
Subject(s) - body shape , set (abstract data type) , perception , trait , covariate , body height , mathematics , regression , statistics , computer science , psychology , artificial intelligence , body weight , biology , neuroscience , programming language , endocrinology
Many studies use representations of human body outlines to study how individual characteristics, such as height and body mass, affect perception of body shape. These typically involve reality‐based stimuli (e.g., pictures) or manipulated stimuli (e.g., drawings). These two classes of stimuli have important drawbacks that limit result interpretations. Realistic stimuli vary in terms of traits that are correlated, which makes it impossible to assess the effect of a single trait independently. In addition, manipulated stimuli usually do not represent realistic morphologies. We describe and examine a method based on elliptic Fourier descriptors to automatically predict and represent body outlines for a given set of predicted variables (e.g., sex, height, and body mass). We first estimate whether these predictive variables are significantly related to human outlines. We find that height and body mass significantly influence body shape. Unlike height, the effect of body mass on shape differs between sexes. Then, we show that we can easily build a regression model that creates hypothetical outlines for an arbitrary set of covariates. These statistically computed outlines are quite realistic and may be used as stimuli in future studies. Am J Phys Anthropol, 2010. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.