An Authoring Tool for Movies in the Style of Heider and Simmel

Gordon, Andrew S.; Roemmele, Melissa

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-12337-0_5

Cited by 13 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Others have designed tools to create new animations in the style of the original Heider and Simmel video (e.g. Gordon & Roemmele, 2014), but few studies tested whether they can also be used to evoke social attributions or mental states.…”

Section: Recent Applications Of Heider and Simmel's Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attributing Social Meaning to Animated Shapes: A New Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior

Ratajska

Brown

Chabris

2020

The American Journal of Psychology

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In 1944, Heider and Simmel reported that observers could perceive simple animated geometric shapes as characters with emotions, intentions, and other social attributes. This work has been cited over 3,000 times and has had wide and ongoing influence on the study of social cognition and social intelligence. However, many researchers in this area have continued to use the original Heider and Simmel black-and-white video. We asked whether the original findings could be reproduced 75 years later by creating 32 new colored animated shape videos designed to depict various social plots and testing whether they can evoke similar spontaneous social attributions. Participants (N = 66) viewed our videos and were asked to write narratives which we coded for indicia of different types of social attributions. Consistent with Heider and Simmel, we found that participants spontaneously attributed social meaning to the videos. We observed that responses to our videos were also similar to responses to the original video reported by Klin (2000), despite being only 13-23 s and portraying a broader range of social plots. Participants varied in how many social attributions they made in response, and the videos varied in how much they elicited such responses. Our set of animated shape videos is freely available online for all researchers to use and forms the basis of a multiple-choice assessment of social intelligence (Brown et al., 2019).

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Section: Recent Applications Of Heider and Simmel's Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attributing Social Meaning to Animated Shapes: A New Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior

Ratajska

Brown

Chabris

2020

The American Journal of Psychology

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“…But in order to experimentally test whether the model-derived space can account for the perception of physical and social events, we need a large number of animations in which movements of simple shapes reflect a variety of complex events in both physical and social domains. Prior work has typically created such stimuli using manually-designed interactions (Gao et al, 2009(Gao et al, , 2010Gordon & Roemmele, 2014;Isik et al, 2017), simulations of rule-based behavior (Kerr & Cohen, 2010;Pantelis et al, 2014;Sano et al, 2020), or trajectories extracted from human activities in aerial videos (Shu et al, 2018). However, these methods of stimulus generation are unable to produce a large set of animations depicting rich behaviors and showing violations of physical and social constraints in a continuous and controlled manner.…”

Section: Continuous Spectrum Increasing Complexitymentioning

confidence: 99%

A unified psychological space for human perception of physical and social events

Shu

Peng

Zhu

et al. 2021

Cognitive Psychology

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One of the great feats of human perception is the generation of quick impressions of both physical and social events based on sparse displays of motion trajectories. Here we aim to provide a unified theory that captures the interconnections between perception of physical and social events. A simulation-based approach is used to generate a variety of animations depicting rich behavioral patterns. Human experiments used these animations to reveal that perception of dynamic stimuli undergoes a gradual transition from physical to social events. A learning-based computational framework is proposed to account for human judgments. The model learns to identify latent forces by inferring a family of potential functions capturing physical laws, and value functions describing the goals of agents. The model projects new animations into a sociophysical space with two psychological dimensions: an intuitive sense of whether physical laws are violated, and an impression of whether an agent possesses intentions to perform goal-directed actions. This derived sociophysical space predicts a meaningful partition between physical and social events, as well as a gradual transition from physical to social perception. The space also predicts human judgments of whether individual objects are lifeless objects in motion, or human agents performing goal-directed actions. These results demonstrate that a theoretical unification based on physical potential functions and goal-related values can account for the human ability to form an immediate impression of physical and social events. This ability provides an important pathway from perception to higher cognition.

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“…Cubus uses non-humanoid characters to allow children's imagination to direct the characters' narratives freely. The use of simple shapes as been shown to allow the creation of rich narratives in similar contexts [19].…”

Section: Human-agent Interactionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cubus: Autonomous Embodied Characters to Stimulate Creative Idea Generation in Groups of Children

Pires

Alves‐Oliveira

Arriaga

et al. 2017

Intelligent Virtual Agents

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Creativity is an ability that is crucial in nowadays societies. It is, therefore, important to develop activities that stimulate creativity at a very young age. It seems, however, that there is a lack of tools to support these activities. In this paper, we introduce Cubus, a tool that uses autonomous synthetic characters to stimulate idea generation in groups of children during a storytelling activity. With Cubus, children can invent a story and use the stop-motion technique to record a movie depicting it. In this paper, we explain Cubus' system design and architecture and present the evaluation of Cubus' impact in a creative task. This evaluation investigated idea generation in groups of children during their creative process of storytelling. Results showed that the autonomous behaviors of Cubus' virtual agents contributed to the generation of more ideas in children, a key dimension of creativity.

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An Authoring Tool for Movies in the Style of Heider and Simmel

Cited by 13 publications

References 16 publications

Attributing Social Meaning to Animated Shapes: A New Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior

Attributing Social Meaning to Animated Shapes: A New Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior

A unified psychological space for human perception of physical and social events

Cubus: Autonomous Embodied Characters to Stimulate Creative Idea Generation in Groups of Children

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