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

Perceptual (roots of) core knowledge

Some core knowledge may be rooted in - or even identical to - well-characterized mechanisms of mid-level visual perception and attention. In the decades since it was first proposed, this possibility has inspired (and has been supported by) several discoveries in both infant cognition and adult perception, but it also faces several challenges. To what degree does What Babies Know reflect how babies see and attend?

Exploring the influence of self-identification on perceptual judgments of physical and social causality

People tend to overestimate the causal contribution of the self to the observed outcome in various situations, a cognitive bias known as the 'illusion of control.' This study delves into whether this cognitive bias impacts causality judgments in animations depicting physical and social causal interactions. In two experiments, participants were instructed to associate themselves and a hypothetical stranger identity with two geometrical shapes (a circle and a square). Subsequently, they viewed animations portraying these shapes assuming the roles of agent and patient in causal interactions. Within one block, the shape related to the self served as the agent, while the shape associated with the stranger played the role of the patient. Conversely, in the other block, the identity-role association was reversed. We posited that the perception of the self as a causal agent might influence explicit judgments of physical and social causality. Experiment 1 demonstrated that physical causality ratings were solely shaped by kinematic cues. In Experiment 2, emphasising social causality, the dominance of kinematic parameters was confirmed. Therefore, contrary to the hypothesis anticipating diminished causality ratings with specific identity-role associations, results indicated negligible impact of our manipulation. The study contributes to understanding the interplay between kinematic and non-kinematic cues in human causal reasoning. It suggests that explicit judgments of causality in simple animations primarily rely on low-level kinematic cues, with the cognitive bias of overestimating the self's contribution playing a negligible role.

Perceiving animacy from kinematics: visual specification of life-likeness in simple geometric patterns

Since the seminal work of Heider and Simmel, and Michotte's research, many studies have shown that, under appropriate conditions, displays of simple geometric shapes elicit rich and vivid impressions of animacy and intentionality. The main purpose of this review is to emphasize the close relationship between kinematics and perceived animacy by showing which specific motion cues and spatiotemporal patterns automatically trigger visual perceptions of animacy and intentionality. The animacy phenomenon has been demonstrated to be rather fast, automatic, irresistible, and highly stimulus-driven. Moreover, there is growing evidence that animacy attributions, although usually associated with higher-level cognition and long-term memory, may reflect highly specialized visual processes that have evolved to support adaptive behaviors critical for survival. The hypothesis of a life-detector hardwired in the perceptual system is also supported by recent studies in early development and animal cognition, as well as by the issue of the "irresistibility" criterion, i.e., the persistence of animacy perception in adulthood even in the face of conflicting background knowledge. Finally, further support for the hypothesis that animacy is processed in the earliest stages of vision comes from recent experimental evidence on the interaction of animacy with other visual processes, such as visuomotor performance, visual memory, and speed estimation. Summarizing, the ability to detect animacy in all its nuances may be related to the visual system's sensitivity to those changes in kinematics - considered as a multifactorial relational system - that are associated with the presence of living beings, as opposed to the natural, inert behavior of physically constrained, form-invariant objects, or even mutually independent moving agents. This broad predisposition would allow the observer not only to identify the presence of animates and to distinguish them from inanimate, but also to quickly grasp their psychological, emotional, and social characteristics.

Hidden intentions: Visual awareness prioritizes perceived attention even without eyes or faces

Eye contact is a powerful social signal, and it readily captures attention. Recent work has suggested that direct gaze is prioritized even unconsciously: faces rendered invisible via interocular suppression enter awareness faster when they look directly at (vs. away from) you. Such effects may be driven in a relatively low level way by the special visual properties of eyes, per se, but here we asked whether they might instead arise from the perception of a deeper property: being the focus of another agent's attention and/or intentions. We report five experiments which collectively explore whether visual awareness also prioritizes distinctly non-eye-like stimuli that nevertheless convey directedness. We first showed that directed (vs. averted) 'mouth' shapes also break through into awareness faster, after being rendered invisible by continuous flash suppression - a direct 'gaze' effect without any eyes. But such effects could still be specific to faces (if not eyes), so we next asked whether the prioritization of directed intentions would still occur even for stimuli that have no faces at all. In fact, even simple geometric shapes can be seen as intentional, as when numerous randomly scattered cones are all consistently pointing at you. And indeed, even such directed (vs. averted) cones entered awareness faster - a direct 'gaze' effect without any facial cues. Additional control experiments ruled out effects of both symmetry and response biases. We conclude that the perception of directed intentions is sufficient to boost objects into awareness, and that putative eye-contact effects might instead reflect more general phenomena of 'mind contact'.

A Dynamical Generative Model of Social Interactions

The ability to make accurate social inferences makes humans able to navigate and act in their social environment effortlessly. Converging evidence shows that motion is one of the most informative cues in shaping the perception of social interactions. However, the scarcity of parameterized generative models for the generation of highly-controlled stimuli has slowed down both the identification of the most critical motion features and the understanding of the computational mechanisms underlying their extraction and processing from rich visual inputs. In this work, we introduce a novel generative model for the automatic generation of an arbitrarily large number of videos of socially interacting agents for comprehensive studies of social perception. The proposed framework, validated with three psychophysical experiments, allows generating as many as 15 distinct interaction classes. The model builds on classical dynamical system models of biological navigation and is able to generate visual stimuli that are parametrically controlled and representative of a heterogeneous set of social interaction classes. The proposed method represents thus an important tool for experiments aimed at unveiling the computational mechanisms mediating the perception of social interactions. The ability to generate highly-controlled stimuli makes the model valuable not only to conduct behavioral and neuroimaging studies, but also to develop and validate neural models of social inference, and machine vision systems for the automatic recognition of social interactions. In fact, contrasting human and model responses to a heterogeneous set of highly-controlled stimuli can help to identify critical computational steps in the processing of social interaction stimuli.

The Perception of Relations

The world contains not only objects and features (red apples, glass bowls, wooden tables), but also relations holding between them (apples contained in bowls, bowls supported by tables). Representations of these relations are often developmentally precocious and linguistically privileged; but how does the mind extract them in the first place? Although relations themselves cast no light onto our eyes, a growing body of work suggests that even very sophisticated relations display key signatures of automatic visual processing. Across physical, eventive, and social domains, relations such as support, fit, cause, chase, and even socially interact are extracted rapidly, are impossible to ignore, and influence other perceptual processes. Sophisticated and structured relations are not only judged and understood, but also seen - revealing surprisingly rich content in visual perception itself.

How Do Object Shape, Semantic Cues, and Apparent Velocity Affect the Attribution of Intentionality to Figures With Different Types of Movements?

A series of experiments show that attribution of intentionality to figures depends on the interaction between the type of movement –Theory of Mind (ToM), Goal-Directed (GD), Random (R)– with the presence of human attributes, the way these figures are labeled, and their apparent velocity. In addition, the effect of these conditions or their interaction varies when the use of human nouns –present in the participant’s responses– is statistically controlled. In Experiment 1, one group of participants observed triangular figures (n = 46) and another observed humanized figures, called Stickman figures (n = 38). In ToM movements, participants attributed more intentionality to triangular figures than to Stickman figures. However, in R movements, the opposite trend was observed. In Experiment 2 (n = 42), triangular figures were presented as if they were people and compared to triangular figures presented in Experiment 1. Here, when the figures were labeled as people the attribution of intentionality only increased in R and GD movements, but not in ToM movements. Finally, in Experiment 3, Stickman figures (n = 45) move at a higher (unnatural) speed with higher frames per second (fps) than the Stickman figures of Experiment 1. This manipulation decreased the attribution of intentionality in R and GD movements but not in ToM movements. In general terms, it was found that the human attributes and labels promote the use of human nouns in participants’ responses, while a high apparent speed reduces their use. The use of human nouns was associated to intentionality scores significantly in R movements, but at a lesser extent in GD and ToM movements. We conclude that, although the type of movement is the most important cue in this sort of task, the tendency to attribute intentionality to figures is affected by the interaction between perceptual and semantic cues (figure shape, label, and apparent speed).

Toward a Unified Theory of Learned Trust in Interpersonal and Human-Machine Interactions

A proposal for a unified theory of learned trust implemented in a cognitive architecture is presented. The theory is instantiated as a computational cognitive model of learned trust that integrates several seemingly unrelated categories of findings from the literature on interpersonal and human-machine interactions and makes unintuitive predictions for future studies. The model relies on a combination of learning mechanisms to explain a variety of phenomena such as trust asymmetry, the higher impact of early trust breaches, the black-hat/white-hat effect, the correlation between trust and cognitive ability, and the higher resilience of interpersonal as compared to human-machine trust. In addition, the model predicts that trust decays in the absence of evidence of trustworthiness or untrustworthiness. The implications of the model for the advancement of the theory on trust are discussed. Specifically, this work suggests two more trust antecedents on the trustor's side: perceived trust necessity and cognitive ability to detect cues of trustworthiness.

Intentionally distracting: Working memory is disrupted by the perception of other agents attending to you - even without eye-gaze cues

Of all the visual stimuli you can perceive, perhaps the most important are other people's eyes. And this is especially true when those eyes are looking at you: direct gaze has profound influences, even at the level of basic cognitive processes such as working memory. For example, memory for the properties of simple geometric shapes is disrupted by the presence of other eyes gazing at you. But are such effects really specific to direct gaze per se? Seeing eyes is undoubtedly important, but presumably only because of what it tells us about the "mind behind the eyes" - i.e., about others' attention and intentions. This suggests that the same effects might arise even without eyes, as long as an agent's directed attention is conveyed by other means. Here we tested the impact on working memory of simple "mouth" shapes - which in no way resemble eyes, yet can still be readily seen as intentionally facing you (or not). Just as with gaze cues, the ability to detect changes in geometric shapes was impaired by direct (compared to averted) mouths - but not in very similar control stimuli that were not perceived as intentional. We conclude that this disruption of working memory reflects a general phenomenon of "mind contact," rather than a specific effect of eye contact.

Perception in dynamic scenes: What is your Heider capacity?

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. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The Development of Anthropomorphism in Interaction: Intersubjectivity, Imagination, and Theory of Mind

Human beings frequently attribute anthropomorphic features, motivations and behaviors to animals, artifacts, and natural phenomena. Historically, many interpretations of this attitude have been provided within different disciplines. What most interpretations have in common is distinguishing children’s manifestations of this attitude, which are considered “natural,” from adults’ occurrences, which must be explained by resorting to particular circumstances. In this article, I argue that anthropomorphism is not grounded in specific belief systems but rather in interaction. In interaction, a non-human entity assumes a place that generally is attributed to a human interlocutor, which means that it is independent of the beliefs that people may have about the nature and features of the entities that are anthropomorphized. This perspective allows us to explain the problems that emerge if we consider anthropomorphism as a belief: (i) adults under certain circumstances may anthropomorphize entities even if they perfectly know that these entities have no mental life; (ii) according to the situation, the same entity may be anthropomorphized or treated as an object; (iii) there is no consistency among the entities that are anthropomorphized; (iv) there is individual variability in anthropomorphization, and this variability derives from affective states rather than from different degrees of knowledge about the entity that is anthropomorphized or greater or lesser naivety of the person who anthropomorphizes. From this perspective, anthropomorphism is a basic human attitude that begins in infants and persists throughout life. The difference between adults and children is not qualitative but rather a matter of complexity.

Encoding of event roles from visual scenes is rapid, spontaneous, and interacts with higher-level visual processing

A crucial component of event recognition is understanding event roles, i.e. who acted on whom: boy hitting girl is different from girl hitting boy. We often categorize Agents (i.e. the actor) and Patients (i.e. the one acted upon) from visual input, but do we rapidly and spontaneously encode such roles even when our attention is otherwise occupied? In three experiments, participants observed a continuous sequence of two-person scenes and had to search for a target actor in each (the male/female or red/blue-shirted actor) by indicating with a button press whether the target appeared on the left or the right. Critically, although role was orthogonal to gender and shirt color, and was never explicitly mentioned, participants responded more slowly when the target's role switched from trial to trial (e.g., the male went from being the Patient to the Agent). In a final experiment, we demonstrated that this effect cannot be fully explained by differences in posture associated with Agents and Patients. Our results suggest that extraction of event structure from visual scenes is rapid and spontaneous.

Intact animacy perception during chase detection in ASD

We explored the strength of implicit social inferences in adolescents with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) using a chasing paradigm in which participants judged the absence/presence of a chase within a display of four seemingly randomly moving dots. While two of these dots always moved randomly, the two others could fulfill the role of being either the chasing (wolf) or chased (sheep) dot. In the chase-present (but not the chase-absent) trials the wolf displayed chasing behavior defined by the degree to which the dot reliably moved towards the sheep (chasing subtlety). Previous research indicated that chasing subtlety strongly influenced chase detection in typically developing (TD) adults. We intended to replicate and extend this finding to adolescents with and without ASD, while also adding either a social or a non-social cue to the displays. Our results confirmed the importance of chasing subtlety and indicated that adding social, but not non-social, information further improved chase detection performance. Interestingly, the performance of adolescents with ASD was less dependent on chasing subtlety than that of their TD counterparts. Nonetheless, adolescents with and without ASD did not differ in their use of the added social (or non-social) cue.

Novel approach to study the perception of animacy in dogs

Humans tend to perceive inanimate objects as animate based on simple motion cues. So far this perceptual bias has been studied mostly in humans by utilizing two-dimensional video and interactive displays. Considering its importance for survival, the perception of animacy is probably also widespread among animals, however two-dimensional displays are not necessarily the best approach to study the phenomenon in non-human species. Here we applied a novel method to study whether dogs recognize a dependent (chasing-like) movement pattern performed by inanimate agents in live demonstration. We found that dogs showed more interest toward the agents that demonstrated the chasing-like motion, compared to those that were involved in the independent movement. We suggest that dogs spontaneously recognized the chasing-like pattern and thus they may have considered the interacting partners as animate agents. This methodological approach may be useful to test perceptual animacy in other non-human species.

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

Impaired attribution of animacy (state of living or being sentient) and of agency (capability of intrinsically-driven action) may underlie social behavior disturbances in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). We presented the Heider and Simmel film of moving geometric shapes to 11 bvFTD patients, 11 Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, and 12 healthy controls (HCs) and rated their recorded verbal responses for animacy attribution and agency attribution. All participants had skin conductance (SC) continuously recorded while viewing the film, and all dementia participants underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for regions of interest. The bvFTD patients, but not the AD patients, were impaired in animacy attribution, compared to the HCs. In contrast, both bvFTD and AD groups were impaired in agency attribution, compared to the HCs, and only the HCs had increasing SC responsiveness during viewing of the film. On MRI analysis of cortical thicknesses, animacy scores significantly correlated across groups with the right pars orbitalis and opercularis; agency scores with the left inferior and superior parietal cortices and the supramarginal gyrus; and both scores with the left cingulate isthmus involved in visuospatial context. These findings suggest that bvFTD is specifically associated with impaired animacy attribution from right inferior frontal atrophy. In contrast, both dementias may have impaired agency attribution from left parietal cortical atrophy and absent SC increases during the film, a sympathetic indicator of attribution of a social "story" to the moving shapes. These findings clarify disease-related changes in social attribution and corroborate the neuroanatomical origins of animacy and agency.