Once again, all eyes were on Pippa Middleton as she walked up the aisle, this time at her own wedding. As she wrote in her book Celebrate: ‘It’s a bit startling to achieve global recognition… on account of your sister, your brother-in-law and your bottom.’
It’s unlikely the biological aspect of how we watch people walking was foremost in her mind last week, but there is good neuroscience behind the claim.
Our brains are especially tuned to see the movements that we and our fellow humans perform and there are particular circuits concerned with perceiving somebody else’s walk, known in the trade as ‘gait’. Studies have shown it is possible to recognise an individual from their walking pattern from any angle. So powerful is the mechanism that even when the walking body is reduced to points of light, carefully placed at the joints of the body, it can still trigger identification, so it may not be the shape or indeed the dress that is the most distinctive feature when it comes to recognising the walker. And we can also reliably infer a person’s emotion from how they walk. An added layer of information for the avid royal watcher.
Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London
