While most studies on person recognition examine the face alone, recent studies have shown evidence for the contribution of the body and gait to person recognition beyond the face. Nevertheless, little is known on whether person recognition can be performed based on the body alone. In this study, we examined two sources of information that may enhance body-based person recognition: body motion and whole person context. Body motion has been shown to contribute to person recognition especially when facial information is unclear. Additionally, generating whole person context, by attaching faceless heads to bodies, has been shown to activate face processing mechanisms and may therefore enhance body-based person recognition. To assess body-based person recognition, participants performed a sequential matching task in which they studied a video of a person walking followed by a headless image of the same or different identity. The role of body motion was examined by comparing recognition from dynamic vs. static headless bodies. The role of whole person context was examined by comparing bodies with and without faceless heads. Our findings show that person recognition from the body alone was better in dynamic vs. static displays indicating that body motion contributed to body-based person recognition. In addition, whole person context contributed to body-based person recognition when recognition was performed in static displays. Overall these findings show that recognizing people based on their body alone is challenging but can be performed under certain circumstances that enhance the processing of the body when seeing the whole dynamic person.

虽然大多数关于人物识别的研究只检查面部，但最近的研究已经显示出身体和步态对面部以外的人物识别的贡献的证据。然而，是否可以仅基于身体进行人物识别还知之甚少。在这项研究中，我们检查了可以增强基于身体的人识别的两种信息来源：身体运动和整个人的背景。身体运动已被证明有助于人的识别，尤其是当面部信息不清楚时。此外，通过将匿名的头部附加到身体来生成整个人的上下文，已被证明可以激活面部处理机制，因此可以增强基于身体的人识别。为了评估基于身体的人的识别，参与者执行了一项顺序匹配任务，他们研究了一个人走路的视频，然后是一个相同或不同身份的无头图像。通过比较动态和静态无头身体的识别来检查身体运动的作用。通过比较有和没有无脸头的身体来检查整个人背景的作用。我们的研究结果表明，在动态与静态显示中，仅从身体识别人的效果更好，这表明身体运动有助于基于身体的人识别。此外，当在静态显示中执行识别时，整个人的上下文有助于基于身体的人识别。