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Imho the most important part of the article:

One concern with the study is that the authors generated the objects specifically from skeletons rather than deriving them from shapes, either natural or human-made, covered by skin, metal, or other materials that people encounter in their day-to-day life. “The shapes that they generated are directly related to the hypothesis they’re testing and the conclusions they’re drawing,” says James Elder, a professor of human and computer vision at York University in Toronto. “If we’re interested in how important skeletons are to shape and object perception, we can’t really answer that question by only looking at the perception of skeleton-generated shapes. Because obviously in a world of skeleton-generated shapes, skeletons are probably fairly important because that’s the way those shapes were made.”

I looked into the paper first and thought: yea well it's really not surprising, that the skeleton models are most predictive for the kind of objects they tested. Their skeleton really is all that defines them.

The only thing they tested and proved is: Skeleton models are predictive for human decision when recognizing objects made just from skeletons with little flesh and hardly any texture whatsoever.

Nevertheless I think skeleton models are a good thing for object recognition



> The only thing they tested and proved is: Skeleton models are predictive for human decision when recognizing objects made just from skeletons with little flesh and hardly any texture whatsoever.

Isn’t it an important result that humans are able to recognize when an object is made just from skeletons and optimize recognition to focus solely on the skeleton? That sounds pretty neat to me


Yes, that's neat, but it's very different to and far more limited than the generality the title and the rest of the article claim.


> Skeleton models are predictive for human decision when recognizing objects made just from skeletons with little flesh

Exactly. One minute reading. Conclusion: junk science.




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