This study is intended to quantitatively clarify the relationship between the motion characteristics behind the human motion in complicated motions like dancing and the subjective impressions of the observer. It examines the impression structures related to the motion of a determined body part of dancing and considers the motion characteristics giving a specific impression. To compare and consider the impression structures related to the motion of a body part, the authors made a principal component analysis, one of the multi-variable analytic methods, to check the arm and leg motions for any differences in the impression structure. Similarly, they considered any differences in the impression structures due to the experience knowledge of dance. Next, to consider any differences in the physical features that have effect on the impressions, they quantified the motion characteristics and used a heavy regression analysis to estimate the common motion characteristics that give the same impressions. In addition, they used the characteristics of the legs that are parts of the motion presumed to have the relationship with the impressions to reproduce the motion with CG for the consideration of these impressions. As a result, when the impressions of the arm and leg motions were compared, four impression evaluation axes of "like-dislike," "dynamic-static," "individual-monotonous," and "collected-wide" were extracted as the axes that evaluated the same impressions, but the impressions of "hard-soft" and "heavy-light" were extracted only from those of each arm or leg motion. When the evaluation axes of the impressions were compared between groups with differences in the knowledge of dance, five similar evaluation axes were extracted for each of them and there was no big difference in the impression structures themselves, but significant differences were found for the evaluation of impressions between the words used for the sensitivity evaluation in difference in knowledge. Attention was paid to the characteristics of the motion generating each impression to show the relationship between motion characteristics and subjective impressions.

SummaryPhysical skills and language skills are both fundamental intelligent abilities of human being. In this paper, we focus our attention to such sophisticated physical skills as playing sports and playing instruments and introduce research activities aiming at elucidating and verbalizing them. This research area has been launched recently. We introduce approaches from physical modeling, measurements and data analysis, cognitive science and human interface. We also discuss such issues as skill acquisition and its support systems. Furthermore, we consider a fundamental issue of individual differences occurring in every application of skill elucidation. Finally we introduce several attempts of skill elucidation in the fields of dancing, manufacturing, playing string instruments, sports science and medical care.

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