Perception in dynamic scenes: What is your Heider capacity?

Abstract

The classic animation experiment by Heider and Simmel (1944) revealed that humans have a strong tendency to impose narrative even on displays showing interactions between simple geometric shapes. In their most famous animation with three simple shapes, observers almost inevitably interpreted them as rational agents with intentions, desires, and beliefs (“That nasty big triangle!”). Much work on dynamic scenes has identified basic visual properties that can make shapes seem animate. Here, we investigate the limits on the ability to use narrative to share information about animated scenes. We created 30 second Heider-style cartoons with 3–9 items. Item trajectories were generated automatically by a simple set of rules, but without a script. In Experiments 1 and 2, 10 observers wrote short narratives for each cartoon. Next, new observers were shown a cartoon and then presented with a narrative generated for that specific cartoon or one generated for a different cartoon having the same items. Observers rated the fit of the narrative to the cartoon on a scale from 1 (clearly does not fit) to 5 (clearly fits). Performance declined markedly when the number of items was larger than 3. Experiment 3 had observers determine if a short clip of a cartoon came from a longer clip. Experiment 4 had observers determine which of two narratives fit a cartoon. Finally, in Experiment 5, narratives always mentioned every item in a display. In all cases of matching narrative to cartoon, performance drops most dramatically between 3 and 4 items.

The Cognitive Architecture of Perceived Animacy: Intention, Attention, and Memory

“…In the area of visual working memory, although there has been a large amount of work on the short-term storage of static features and objects, only a few studies have explored how working memory maintains objects' motion trajectories (e.g., Papenmeier, Huff, & Schwan, 2012;Sun et al, 2015). Consistent with discoveries of visual working memory, it has been shown that performance of identifying an animate display based on a narrative drops most dramatically between 3 and 4 items in the display (Wick, Alaoui Soce, Garg, Grace, & Wolfe, 2019). In this study, we systemically vary how rapidly motion information decays in the working memory component of our model and analyze how this memory rate impacts the perception of goal-directed motion.…”

Realistic and complex visual chasing behaviors trigger the perception of intentionality

“…For instance, Barrett and colleagues [1] demonstrated that participants could accurately judge different types of intentional behaviors exhibited by simple geometric shapes including chasing, courting, following, etc. This, along with a great deal of other work, has together indicated that the perception that objects are being guided by any number of different intentions, including attracting, repulsing, and/or avoiding other objects, can be induced by careful design of the objects' movement patterns [6,7].…”