Perceiving animacy in ‘identical’ images
Some objects appear ‘animate’ (e.g. dogs and elephants) while others do not (e.g. boots and sofas). This distinction pervades human cognition, with an expansive literature reporting striking effects of animacy on vision, memory, social perception, and neural organization. But studies of perceived animacy face a persistent challenge: Objects that differ in animacy tend to differ in many…
Objects are often perceived as either animate or non-animate, a distinction that plays a significant role in human cognition. Numerous studies have shown that animacy has wide-ranging effects on vision, memory, social perception, and neural organization. However, there has been ongoing debate about whether animacy itself drives visual processing or if it is merely a result of its lower-level visual features, such as shape, texture, and spatial frequency.
To address this controversy, a new study has been conducted using a cutting-edge technique called 'visual anagrams.' This method generates static images whose interpretations can change drastically depending on the orientation. By employing this technique, researchers were able to vary animacy while keeping nearly all other lower-level visual features constant. Eight pre-registered experiments were conducted to explore how the visual system represents animacy beyond its lower-level correlates.
The findings of these experiments reveal that the visual system indeed processes animacy as a distinct feature, separate from its lower-level characteristics. Moreover, this representation of animacy appears to influence visual working memory and guide visual attention. In summary, the study demonstrates that the visual system can extract animacy itself, highlighting the importance of this distinction in visual processing.
Written by urgent.news from eLife's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
