The automaticity of perceiving animacy: Goal-directed motion in simple shapes influences visuomotor behavior even when task-irrelevant

Abstract

Visual processing recovers not only simple features, such as color and shape, but also seemingly higherlevel properties, such as animacy. Indeed, even abstract geometric shapes are readily perceived as intentional agents when they move in certain ways, and such percepts can dramatically influence behavior. In the wolfpack effect, for example, subjects maneuver a disc around a display in order to avoid several randomly moving darts. When the darts point toward the disc, subjects (falsely) perceive that the darts are chasing them, and this impairs several types of visuomotor performance. Are such effects reflexive, automatic features of visual processing? Or might they instead arise only as contingent strategies in tasks in which subjects must interact with (and thus focus on the features of) such objects? We explored these questions in an especially direct way-by embedding such displays into the background of a completely independent "foraging" task. Subjects now moved their disc to collect small "food" dots (which appeared sequentially in random locations) as quickly as possible. The darts were task-irrelevant, and subjects were encouraged to ignore them. Nevertheless, foraging was impaired when the randomly moving darts pointed at the subjects' disc, as compared to control conditions in which they were either oriented orthogonally to the subjects' disc or pointed at another moving shape-thereby controlling for nonsocial factors. The perception of animacy thus influences downstream visuomotor behavior in an automatic manner, such that subjects cannot completely override the influences of seemingly animate shapes even while attempting to ignore them.

Novel approach to study the perception of animacy in dogs

“…We suggest that the present data provide stronger evidence on the presence of the phenomenon. Our new method serves better the call from other researchers who suggested that by studying participants’ implicit interactive behaviour, more objective data can be obtained, thus it may be a more suitable way to test the perception of animacy [14,24,27]. In line with this, here we also investigated whether the observation of the dependent motion pattern performed by inanimate agents would have an effect on subjects’ behaviour.…”

Toward a Perceptual Account of Mindreading

“…a particular class of movement), they fail to demonstrate that there is a perceptual presentation of psychological states. Thus, in contrast to the conclusion that participants perceive goal‐directedness (van Buren, Uddenberg and Scholl , 797), the worry is that the relevant perceptual state presents chasing, which then elicits the supplementary attribution to the chaser the desire catch its target, or the intention to flee. However, chasing is the superordinate visual classification of the moving shapes ‐ the overall category in which the perceptual experiences are grouped.…”

The attribution of animacy and agency in frontotemporal dementia versus Alzheimer's disease

“…Furthermore, the attribution of animacy from these geometric shapes allows for inferences about goals, intentions, and personality characteristics and permits subsequent mechanisms of social cognition, such as mentalizing and empathy (Heider & Simmel, 1944; Santos et al, 2010; Scholl & Tremoulet, 2000). In normal people, these downstream social cognitive processes necessarily follow once animacy is perceived (van Buren et al, 2016). …”

“…These mechanisms help detect goal-directed motion, attribute intention, distinguish intentional movements from mechanical ones, and dissociate intentionality from animacy detection (Blakemore et al, 2003; Gao, Scholl, & McCarthy, 2012; Lee, Gao, & McCarthy, 2014; Stosic, Brass, Van Hoeck, Ma, & Van Overwalle, 2014). From these investigations, and others, two basic aspects of social attribution emerge: that of ascribing animacy (van Buren, Uddenberg, & Scholl, 2016; Gao and Scholl, 2011; Santos et al, 2010; Schultz & Bülthoff, 2013), and that of ascribing agency (Gobbini et al, 2007; Osaka, Ikeda, & Osaka, 2012; Stosic et al, 2014). …”