Humans are able to successfully detect characteristics about
others that serve to guide interaction, yet the source of this
information is unclear. We hypothesized that biological
motion specifies sex and race as these invariant categorical
characteristics often guide interaction. Results indicated that
movement kinematics are necessary but not sufficient for sex
detection and that race is detectable when movement is
produced by Caucasians but not African Americans, and only
when kinematic information is embedded in body structure.
These results imply that social psychological perspectives on
person perception should be integrated with ecological
psychological perspectives on affordances in order to
understand social cognition.