Perceiving harmony behind walking: a study on healthy subjects

This study aims to investigate how the naturalness of movement is perceived in a sample of healthy participants. Specifically, 256 people (34.2 ± 10.8 years; M = 89; F = 167) were asked by means of an online questionnaire to give an evaluation of the naturalness of a video showing a girl walking along a walkway. We presented four videos of which only one had been recorded in „normal” forward walking and at a comfortable speed and which presented a gait ratio coinciding with the golden proportion. For the other three we have instead recorded some motor tasks in which the same person walked in a different way: walking back, slowly, quickly. The participants evaluated each video, without knowing how they have been recorded: the videos were all modified so as not to seem too different from the forward one in order to not induce a bias in the evaluation. The results show that the subjects preferred the video in which the girl walked in forward golden mode.