Parametric induction of animacy experience

Do We Differ in Our Dispositional Tendency to Perceive Virtual Agents as Animate Beings?

“…The behavioral cues leading to animacy attributions that are described in the literature include interrupted movement near secondary objects, approach of secondary objects, responses of secondary objects, speed change, direction change, and spatial context [15,16,22]. The presence of these characteristics has a strong impact on the perceived animacy and should result in firm attributions of animacy, which is only of little diagnostic value.…”

“…The impression of animacy can be seen as a perceptual phenomenon, during which we ascribe intention towards an entity that follows specific movement patterns [15][16][17]. Early work by Heider and Simmel [18] already showed, how observers of rather simplistic movements of geometric shapes infer complex narratives about the motives and actions of the supposed actors.…”

“…The type of motion carried out by the geometric shapes has repeatedly been shown to have a major impact on the likelihood of animacy attributions [16,17,19]. Recently Santos and colleagues [15] investigated different movement parameters and their impact on animacy judgments. They concluded that interruptions of otherwise generic movements, changes of the movement direction towards other entities and interactions between entities reliably lead to a stronger animacy attribution.…”

“…Perceiving other entities as animate is a fundamental human ability [15] and is thus deeply routed within our brains recruiting neural structures with strong ties to social cognition [21]. Entities in our perceptual environment elicit momentary animacy attributions or not.…”

Abstract Feelings Emerging from Haptic Stimulation

“…This feeling of the animacy of inanimate objects has been well investigated in the context of animacy perception (Blakemore et al, 2003;Gao et al, 2010;Gao & Scholl, 2011;Heider & Simmel, 1944;Scholl & Tremoulet, 2000). In animacy perception, given the mutually interactive motion of multiple visual objects, human observers sense intention or sociality in artificial visual objects (Fukuda & Ueda, 2010;Gao et al, 2009;Santos et al, 2008). Furthermore, recent studies have reported that a particular motion pattern of a single visual object could induce animacy perception (Tremoulet & Feldman, 2000), which implies that apparently higher cognitive appreciation of complex properties such as animacy may originate from low-level sensory processes.…”