Question: Is your work based on the practical aspect of physiology or is it based in labs using test results to find new thing out?

Pete Etchells answered on 20 Jun 2012:

Hi maddydavies! My work is actually in psychology, not physiology. At the moment, I’m using a motion capture lab to take what we call ‘point light’ videos of people walking (where they basically look like a bunch of white dots on a black screen). We show these videos to other people, and ask them various things about the personality of the walking person – for instance, do they look aggressive, or do they look nervous? We then see if these judgements match how the walking person actually feels about themselves – in other words, can people figure out aspects of other people’s personalities, just from the way that we walk.

So really, we’re coming up with new experiments that have never been done before, using stimuli that we make ourselves, to answer new questions!