Perception of Animacy from the Motion of a Single Object
- 1 August 2000
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Perception
- Vol. 29 (8), 943-951
- https://doi.org/10.1068/p3101
Abstract
We demonstrate that a single moving object can create the subjective impression that it is alive, based solely on its pattern of movement. Our displays differ from conventional biological motion displays (which normally involve multiple moving points, usually integrated to suggest a human form) in that they contain only a single rigid object moving across a uniform field. We focus on motion paths in which the speed and direction of the target object change simultaneously. Naive subjects' ratings of animacy were significantly influenced by (i) the magnitude of the speed change, (ii) the angular magnitude of the direction change, (iii) the shape of the object, and (iv) the alignment between the principal axis of the object and its direction of motion. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that observers classify as animate only those objects whose motion trajectories are otherwise unlikely to occur in the observed setting.Keywords
This publication has 17 references indexed in Scilit:
- The Computational Perception of Scene DynamicsComputer Vision and Image Understanding, 1997
- Configural processing in the perception of apparent biological motion.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1996
- Dynamics and the orientation of kinematic forms in visual event recognition.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1995
- Visual Perception of Intentional MotionPerception, 1994
- Recognition of Animal Locomotion from Dynamic Point-Light DisplaysPerception, 1993
- Action Categories and the Perception of Biological MotionPerception, 1993
- The infant's theory of self-propelled objectsCognition, 1990
- The Perception of IntentionScience, 1989
- Observers’ sensitivity to dynamic anomalies in collisionsPerception & Psychophysics, 1987
- Temporal and spatial contingencies in the perception of social events.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1976