Judging whether someone is a good dancer or not is pretty subjective. A study by the UK's Northumbria University has used featureless avatars of females dancing to find out which moves will best attract a mate.

First they kitted out female volunteers in motion capture suits and filmed them in a T-shape pose, so cameras could map their bodies into featureless avatars.

They then used video game software to make each volunteer's avatar a similar height and weight, to avoid bias.

"After we've got a wire frame diagram of our subjects dancing around, we then have to normalize their height and their build, which would otherwise be visible, using a 3D model,” said Chris McCarty from Northumbria University.

Then it was time for the women to strut their stuff to a Robbie Williams backing track.

Finally, 200 heterosexual volunteers, including males and females, rated the dancing on a scale of 1-7.

According to Dr Nick Neave, an associate professor from Northumbria University, the study suggested four things that characterize high quality female dancing. The first was large movements of the hips. The second was the ability to keep in time, to a rhythm. The third was asymmetric movements of the arms, which means that the arms were doing something slightly different to one another; and the fourth was the same thing for the legs.

Earlier studies have suggested dancing is closely linked to courtship rituals and fertility.

Previously the Northumbria team examined male dancing.

Neave said that male dancers usually show off their strength, not to females particularly but to other males. He suspects that female dance moves will signify the same kinds of things, but in relation to fertility, health, and reproductive status.

“We're yet to do this research but we do expect to find that there could be close links between a female's health and reproductive quality and her fertility, say, and her dance moves,” Nick added.

The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

(With inputs from Reuters)