Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Latin American dancing relies heavily on Cuban Motion (CM) to captivate audiences with its powerful, enchanting, and beautiful expressions. We researched how skilled dancers' CM movements influence audience perceptions. We compared CM movement and evaluations between different skill levels. From previous research, we hypothesize that expert's CM is symmetrical and involves whole-body coordination. Result showed that the heel and other body parts were coordinated in the R-L direction and that the hip trajectory in the horizontal plane was highly circular. However, contrary to the hypothesis, the symmetrical feature of the CM's hip trajectories of experts was divided into two groups: symmetrical / asymmetrical expert. In the evaluation results, the symmetrical group was evaluated higher for factor of Aesthetics and Dynamism, while the asymmetrical group was lower.