Category Trumps Shape as an Organizational Principle of Object Space in the Human Occipitotemporal Cortex.

The organizational principles of the object space represented in the human ventral visual cortex are debated. Here we contrast two prominent proposals that, in addition to an organization in terms of animacy, propose either a representation related to aspect ratio (stubby-spiky) or to the distinction between faces and bodies. We designed a critical test that dissociates the latter two categories from aspect ratio and investigated responses from human fMRI (of either sex) and deep neural networks (BigBiGAN). Representational similarity and decoding analyses showed that the object space in the occipitotemporal cortex and BigBiGAN was partially explained by animacy but not by aspect ratio. Data-driven approaches showed clusters for face and body stimuli and animate-inanimate separation in the representational space of occipitotemporal cortex and BigBiGAN, but no arrangement related to aspect ratio. In sum, the findings go in favor of a model in terms of an animacy representation combined with strong selectivity for faces and bodies.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT We contrasted animacy, aspect ratio, and face-body as principal dimensions characterizing object space in the occipitotemporal cortex. This is difficult to test, as typically faces and bodies differ in aspect ratio (faces are mostly stubby and bodies are mostly spiky). To dissociate the face-body distinction from the difference in aspect ratio, we created a new stimulus set in which faces and bodies have a similar and very wide distribution of values along the shape dimension of the aspect ratio. Brain imaging (fMRI) with this new stimulus set showed that, in addition to animacy, the object space is mainly organized by the face-body distinction and selectivity for aspect ratio is minor (despite its wide distribution).

Do preschoolers trust a competent robot pointer?

How young children learn from different informants has been widely studied. However, most studies investigate how children learn verbally conveyed information. Furthermore, most studies investigate how children learn from humans. This study sought to investigate how 3-year-old children learn from, and come to trust, a competent robot versus an incompetent human when competency is established using a pointing paradigm. During an induction phase, a robot informant pointed at a toy inside a transparent box, whereas a human pointed at an empty box. During the test phase, both agents pointed at opaque boxes. We found that young children asked the robot for help to locate a hidden toy more than the human (ask questions) and correctly identified the robot to be accurate (judgment questions). However, children equally endorsed the locations pointed at by both the robot and the human (endorse questions). This suggests that 3-year-olds are sensitive to the epistemic characteristics of the informant even when its displayed social properties are minimal.

The animacy (bias) effect in recognition: testing the influence of intentionality of learning and retrieval quality.

The animacy effect, a memory advantage for animate/living over inanimate/non-living items, is well-documented in free recall, but unclear in recognition memory. This might relate to the encoding tasks that have been used and/or to an unequal influence of animacy on the processes underlying recognition (recollection or familiarity). This study reports a recognition memory experiment, coupled with a remember/know procedure. An intentional and two incidental learning conditions (one animacy-related and one animacy-unrelated) were used. No animacy effect was found in discriminability (A') irrespectively of the encoding condition. Still, different mechanisms in incidental and intentional conditions conducted to said result. Overall, animates (vs. inanimates) elicited more hits and also more false alarms. Moreover, participants tended to assign more remember responses to animate (vs. inanimate) hits, denoting higher recollection for the former. These findings are suggestive of an animacy bias in recognition, which was stronger in the animacy-related encoding condition. Ultimate and proximate mechanisms underlying the animacy effect are examined.

Life is in motion (through a chick's eye).

Cognitive scientists, social psychologists, computer scientists, neuroscientists, ethologists and many others have all wondered how brains detect and interpret the motion of living organisms. It appears that specific cues, incorporated into our brains by natural selection, serve to signal the presence of living organisms. A simple geometric figure such as a triangle put in motion with specific kinematic rules can look alive, and it can even seem to have intentions and goals. In this article, we survey decades of parallel investigations on the motion cues that drive animacy perception-the sensation that something is alive-in non-human animals, especially in precocial species, such as the domestic chick, to identify inborn biological predispositions. At the same time, we highlight the relevance of these studies for an understanding of human typical and atypical cognitive development.

Naïve chicks do not prefer objects with stable body orientation, though they may prefer behavioural variability.

Domestic chicks (Gallus gallus domesticus) have been widely used as a model to study the motion cues that allow visually naïve organisms to detect animate agents shortly after hatching/birth. Our previous work has shown that chicks prefer to approach agents whose main body axis and motion direction are aligned (a feature typical of creatures whose motion is constrained by a bilaterally symmetric body plan). However, it has never been investigated whether chicks are also sensitive to the fact that an agent maintains a stable front-back body orientation in motion (i.e. consistency in which end is leading and which trailing). This is another feature typical of bilateria, which is also associated with the detection of animate agents in humans. The aim of the present study was to fill this gap. Contrary to our initial expectations, after testing 300 chicks across 3 experimental conditions, we found a recurrent preference for the agent which did not maintain a stable front-back body orientation. Since this preference was limited to female chicks, the results are discussed also in relation to sex differences in the social behaviour of this model. Overall, we show for the first time that chicks can discriminate agents based on the stability of their front-back orientation. The unexpected direction of the effect could reflect a preference for agents' whose behaviour is less predictable. Chicks may prefer agents with greater behavioural variability, a trait which has been associated with animate agents, or have a tendency to explore agents performing "odd behaviours".

A spontaneous gravity prior: newborn chicks prefer stimuli that move against gravity.

At the beginning of life, inexperienced animals use evolutionary-given preferences (predispositions) to decide what stimuli to attend and approach. Stimuli that contain cues of animacy, such as face-like stimuli, biological motion and changes in speed, are particularly attractive across vertebrate taxa. A strong cue of animacy is upward movement against terrestrial gravity, because only animate objects consistently move upward. To test whether upward movement is spontaneously considered attractive already at birth, we tested the early preferences of dark-hatched chicks (Gallus gallus) for upward- versus downward-moving visual stimuli. We found that, without any previous visual experience, chicks consistently exhibited a preference to approach stimuli that move upward, against gravity. A control experiment showed that these preferences are not driven by avoidance of downward stimuli. These results show that newborn animals have a gravity prior that attracts them toward upward movement. Movement against gravity can be used as a cue of animacy to orient early approach responses in the absence of previous visual experience.

Animacy enhances recollection but not familiarity: Convergent evidence from the remember-know-guess paradigm and the process-dissociation procedure.

Words representing living beings are better remembered than words representing nonliving objects, a robust finding called the animacy effect. Considering the postulated evolutionary-adaptive significance of this effect, the animate words' memory advantage should not only affect the quantity but also the quality of remembering. To test this assumption, we compared the quality of recognition memory between animate and inanimate words. The remember-know-guess paradigm (Experiment 1) and the process-dissociation procedure (Experiment 2) were used to assess both subjective and objective aspects of remembering. Based on proximate accounts of the animacy effect that focus on elaborative encoding and attention, animacy is expected to selectively enhance detailed recollection but not the acontextual feeling of familiarity. Multinomial processing-tree models were applied to disentangle recollection, familiarity, and different types of guessing processes. Results obtained from the remember-know-guess paradigm and the process-dissociation procedure convergently show that animacy selectively enhances recollection but does not affect familiarity. In both experiments, guessing processes were unaffected by the words' animacy status. Animacy thus not only enhances the quantity but also affects the quality of remembering: The effect is primarily driven by recollection. The results support the richness-of-encoding account and the attentional account of the animacy effect on memory.

Using lexical semantic cues to mitigate interference effects during real-time sentence processing in aphasia.

We examined the auditory sentence processing of neurologically unimpaired listeners and individuals with aphasia on canonical sentence structures in real-time using a visual-world eye-tracking paradigm. The canonical sentence constructions contained multiple noun phrases and an unaccusative verb, the latter of which formed a long-distance dependency link between the unaccusative verb and its single argument (which was base generated in the object position and then displaced to the subject position). To explore the likelihood of similarity-based interference during the real time linking of the verb and the sentence's subject noun, we manipulated the animacy feature of the noun phrases (matched or mismatched). The study's objectives were to examine whether (a) reducing the similarity-based interference by mismatching animacy features would modulate the encoding and retrieval dynamics of noun phrases in real-time; and (b) whether individuals with aphasia would demonstrate on time sensitivity to this lexical-semantic cue. Results revealed a significant effect of this manipulation in individuals both with and without aphasia. In other words, the mismatch in the representational features of the noun phrases increased the distinctiveness of the unaccusative verb's subject target at the time of syntactic retrieval (verb offset) for individuals in both groups. Moreover, individuals with aphasia were shown to be sensitive to the lexical-semantic cue, even though they appeared to process it slower than unimpaired listeners. This study extends to the cue-based retrieval model by providing new insight on the real-time mechanisms underpinning sentence comprehension.

Effects of AR-Based Home Appliance Agents on User's Perception and Maintenance Behavior.

Maintenance of home appliances can be tedious. Maintenance work can be physically demanding and it is not always easy to know the cause of a malfunctioning appliance. Many users need to motivate themselves to perform maintenance work and consider it ideal for home appliances to be maintenance-free. On the other hand, pets and other living creatures can be taken care of with joy and without much pain, even if they are difficult to take care of. To alleviate the hassle associated with the maintenance of home appliances, we propose an augmented reality (AR) system to superimpose an agent over the home appliance of concern who changes their behavior according to the internal state of the appliance. Taking a refrigerator as an example, we verify whether such AR agent visualization motivates users to perform maintenance work and reduces the associated discomfort. We designed a cartoon-like agent and implemented a prototype system using a HoloLens 2, which can switch between several animations depending on the internal state of the refrigerator. Using the prototype system, a Wizard of Oz user study comparing three conditions was conducted. We compared the proposed method (Animacy condition), an additional behavior method (Intelligence condition), and a text-based method as a baseline for presenting the refrigerator state. In the Intelligence condition, the agent looked at the participants from time to time as if it was aware of them and exhibited help-seeking behavior only when it was considered that they could take a short break. The results show that both the Animacy and Intelligence conditions induced animacy perception and a sense of intimacy. It was also evident that the agent visualization made the participants feel more pleasant. On the other hand, the sense of discomfort was not reduced by the agent visualization and the Intelligence condition did not improve the perceived intelligence or the sense of coercion further compared to the Animacy condition.

Investigation of the Relationship Between Animacy and L2 Learners' Acquisition of the English Plural Morpheme.

It has been argued that languages differ in the extent to which they allow plural forms of nouns according to the Animacy Hierarchy. Japanese distinguishes between animate and inanimate nouns; the latter are less likely to receive plural markers (e.g., ?hon­tachi), unlike English. This L1-L2 difference might cause difficulty in acquiring the plural morpheme. The present study thus investigates the influence of animacy on the processing of the English plural morpheme in online sentence processing. In this study, 34 Japanese university students engaged in a moving window version of a self-paced reading task, during which they also judged whether the number of words presented was one or two when prompted. If animacy matters, Japanese EFL learners might not show an interference effect of this second task for inanimate nouns. However, as no such effect was found, the prediction based on the animacy hierarchy was not confirmed.

The Role of Animacy in Turkish Relative Clause Production and Distribution.

Relative clause (RC) production has been a major tool used for understanding language production mechanism in experimental linguistics. The present study analyzes language production mechanisms in Turkish by utilizing animacy effect on RC production. A picture description task was applied to two participant groups. The data were combined and analyzed to see how animacy influenced RC formation. The outcomes were also compared to the distributions of RC use in corpus data. Both participant and corpus data demonstrated significant level of passivization for RCs with animate heads, strongly affirming the grammatical function assignment proposal by Bock and Warren (Cognition 21(1):47-67, 1985) as well as the premise of Production-Distribution-Comprehension account (MacDonald in Front Psychol 4:226, 2013), emphasizing the relationship between language production mechanisms and typology. However, the corpus data were observed to have higher numbers of passivization with animate condition. Accordingly, a coarse comparison of the participant RC production proportions in the current study with some other crosslinguistic research suggests that some language-specific or discourse-related interventions can also compete with the animacy accessibility during the sentence planning procedure, which needs an extra inquiry especially in Turkish language.

Untangling the Animacy Organization of Occipitotemporal Cortex.

Some of the most impressive functional specializations in the human brain are found in the occipitotemporal cortex (OTC), where several areas exhibit selectivity for a small number of visual categories, such as faces and bodies, and spatially cluster based on stimulus animacy. Previous studies suggest this animacy organization reflects the representation of an intuitive taxonomic hierarchy, distinct from the presence of face- and body-selective areas in OTC. Using human functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated the independent contribution of these two factors-the face-body division and taxonomic hierarchy-in accounting for the animacy organization of OTC and whether they might also be reflected in the architecture of several deep neural networks that have not been explicitly trained to differentiate taxonomic relations. We found that graded visual selectivity, based on animal resemblance to human faces and bodies, masquerades as an apparent animacy continuum, which suggests that taxonomy is not a separate factor underlying the organization of the ventral visual pathway.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Portions of the visual cortex are specialized to determine whether types of objects are animate in the sense of being capable of self-movement. Two factors have been proposed as accounting for this animacy organization: representations of faces and bodies and an intuitive taxonomic continuum of humans and animals. We performed an experiment to assess the independent contribution of both of these factors. We found that graded visual representations, based on animal resemblance to human faces and bodies, masquerade as an apparent animacy continuum, suggesting that taxonomy is not a separate factor underlying the organization of areas in the visual cortex.

Capacity for movement is an organisational principle in object representations.

The ability to perceive moving objects is crucial for threat identification and survival. Recent neuroimaging evidence has shown that goal-directed movement is an important element of object processing in the brain. However, prior work has primarily used moving stimuli that are also animate, making it difficult to disentangle the effect of movement from aliveness or animacy in representational categorisation. In the current study, we investigated the relationship between how the brain processes movement and aliveness by including stimuli that are alive but still (e.g., plants), and stimuli that are not alive but move (e.g., waves). We examined electroencephalographic (EEG) data recorded while participants viewed static images of moving or non-moving objects that were either natural or artificial. Participants classified the images according to aliveness, or according to capacity for movement. Movement explained significant variance in the neural data over and above that of aliveness, showing that capacity for movement is an important dimension in the representation of visual objects in humans.

Chasing perception in domestic cats and dogs.

Chasing motion is often used to study the perception of inanimate objects as animate. When chasing interaction and independent motions between two agents are displayed simultaneously on a screen, we expect observers to quickly perceive and recognise the chasing pattern (because of its familiarity) and turn their attention to the independent motion (novelty effect). In case of isosceles triangles as moving figures, dogs and humans both display this behaviour, but dogs initially preferred to look at the chasing pattern whereas humans started to increase their gaze towards the independent motion earlier. Here, we compared whether family cats perceive moving inanimate objects as animate and whether their looking behaviour is similar to that of small family dogs. We displayed a chasing and independent motion side by side on a screen in two consecutive trials and assessed subjects' looking behaviour towards the motions. Similarly to previous studies, we found that dogs eventually looked longer at the independent motion, but cats preferred to look at the independent motion at the beginning of the video display and only later shifted their attention to the chasing motion. No difference was found in the frequency of gaze alternation of the two species. Thus, although cats discriminate between the chasing and independent motions, it is not clear whether this discrimination is controlled by animate motion cues. The difference may originate from their ecological situation and/or may be explained by specific perceptual mechanisms.

Analyzing the structure of animacy: Exploring relationships among six new animacy and 15 existing normative dimensions for 1,200 concrete nouns.

Animacy is an important word variable (especially for episodic memory), yet no norms exist in the literature. We present a complete, usable normative data set of 1,200 relatively concrete nouns normed on 15 existing dimensions (concreteness, familiarity, imagery, availability, valence, arousal, dominance, age of acquisition, length, orthographic neighborhood, phonographic neighborhood, number of syllables, and subtitle frequency/contextual diversity) and six new animacy dimensions (a general living/non-living scale, ability to think, ability to reproduce, similarity to a person, goal-directedness, and movement likelihood). Principal component analysis of these 21 dimensions revealed that animacy scales were conceptually different from extant word variables. Further, factor analysis of the six new scales revealed these animacy norms may be separable into two dimensions: a "Mental" component related to animates' ability to think and have goals, and a "Physical" component related to animates' general resemblance to living things. These data provide useful theoretical insight into the structure of the animacy dimension, an important factor in many cognitive processes. The norms are accessible at https://osf.io/4t3cu .

Thinking of death and remembering living things: mortality salience and the animacy effect.

The animacy effect, the finding that animate items are better remembered than inanimate items, provides evidence that human memory prioritizes information that is related to survival. Various proximate mechanisms for this memory effect have been proposed, including mortality salience, that humans are more likely to remember information related to death, and animate items (e.g., shark, tiger) are more likely to elicit thoughts of death than inanimate items (e.g., volleyball, towel). Mortality salience was manipulated in Experiment 1. Animate items were recalled more than inanimate items and threatening items were recalled more than nonthreatening items, but there was no significant effect of mortality salience. For Experiment 2, norming data were collected rating the word stimuli from the previous experiment on the characteristics of arousal, valence, likelihood to capture attention, and likelihood to elicit thoughts of death. These ratings along with threat ratings and animacy status of the items were included in a regression analysis with the frequency of recall of the items in Experiment 1. In addition to animacy, likelihood to capture attention and likelihood to elicit thoughts of death were significant predictors of recall, suggesting that these characteristics could be at least partly responsible for the animacy effect.

Roles of Category, Shape, and Spatial Frequency in Shaping Animal and Tool Selectivity in the Occipitotemporal Cortex.

Does the nature of representation in the category-selective regions in the occipitotemporal cortex reflect visual or conceptual properties? Previous research showed that natural variability in visual features across categories, quantified by image gist statistics, is highly correlated with the different neural responses observed in the occipitotemporal cortex. Using fMRI, we examined whether category selectivity for animals and tools would remain, when image gist statistics were comparable across categories. Critically, we investigated how category, shape, and spatial frequency may contribute to the category selectivity in the animal- and tool-selective regions. Female and male human observers viewed low- or high-passed images of round or elongated animals and tools that shared comparable gist statistics in the main experiment, and animal and tool images of naturally varied gist statistics in a separate localizer. Univariate analysis revealed robust category-selective responses for images with comparable gist statistics across categories. Successful classification for category (animals/tools), shape (round/elongated), and spatial frequency (low/high) was also observed, with highest classification accuracy for category. Representational similarity analyses further revealed that the activation patterns in the animal-selective regions were most correlated with a model that represents only animal information, whereas the activation patterns in the tool-selective regions were most correlated with a model that represents only tool information, suggesting that these regions selectively represent information of only animals or tools. Together, in addition to visual features, the distinction between animal and tool representations in the occipitotemporal cortex is likely shaped by higher-level conceptual influences such as categorization or interpretation of visual inputs.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Since different categories often vary systematically in both visual and conceptual features, it remains unclear what kinds of information determine category-selective responses in the occipitotemporal cortex. To minimize the influences of low- and mid-level visual features, here we used a diverse image set of animals and tools that shared comparable gist statistics. We manipulated category (animals/tools), shape (round/elongated), and spatial frequency (low/high), and found that the representational content of the animal- and tool-selective regions is primarily determined by their preferred categories only, regardless of shape or spatial frequency. Our results show that category-selective responses in the occipitotemporal cortex are influenced by higher-level processing such as categorization or interpretation of visual inputs, and highlight the specificity in these category-selective regions.

Dogs' looking times and pupil dilation response reveal expectations about contact causality.

Contact causality is one of the fundamental principles allowing us to make sense of our physical environment. From an early age, humans perceive spatio-temporally contiguous launching events as causal. Surprisingly little is known about causal perception in non-human animals, particularly outside the primate order. Violation-of-expectation paradigms in combination with eye-tracking and pupillometry have been used to study physical expectations in human infants. In the current study, we establish this approach for dogs (Canis familiaris). We presented dogs with realistic three-dimensional animations of launching events with contact (regular launching event) or without contact between the involved objects. In both conditions, the objects moved with the same timing and kinematic properties. The dogs tracked the object movements closely throughout the study but their pupils were larger in the no-contact condition and they looked longer at the object initiating the launch after the no-contact event compared to the contact event. We conclude that dogs have implicit expectations about contact causality.

Children's Perception of Animacy: Social Attributions to Moving Figures.

Adults describe abstract shapes moving in a goal-directed manner using animate terms. This study tested which variables affect school-aged children's descriptions of moving geometrical shapes. Children aged 5 to 9 years were shown displays of interacting geometrical shapes and were asked to describe them. Across participants, instructions, number of moving figures, whether a figure caught another, and complexity of the scene were manipulated. Nine-year-olds used significantly more animate phrases than 5-year-olds. Furthermore, we found an Age by Condition interaction. Five-year-olds made significantly more animate statements in the animate condition, while 7-year-olds and 9-year-olds were less affected by instructions. Scene complexity increased children's use of animate phrases. Number of agents present on the screen and whether a catch occurred did not impact children's animate attributions. Our results support the hypothesis that children, like adults, are attuned to animacy cues and describe chasing agents in animate terms.

Animacy and animate imagery improve retention in the method of loci among novice users.

Recently, researchers have identified word animacy as a strong predictor of recall. In contrast, the method of loci is an ancient mnemonic technique which takes advantage of highly structured encoding and recall processes alongside a strong imagery component to create easily remembered "memory palaces." The present experiments examine the combined effectiveness of these techniques: Experiment 1 (N = 154) demonstrates that the method of loci and word animacy have additive effects, while Experiment 2 (N = 200) demonstrates that the additive effect of animacy is likely related to both the animate nature of words themselves and animate imagery associated with them. These results have implications for hypotheses about the proximate mechanism of animacy effects (ruling out temporal order and imagery as explanations), implications regarding the nature of animacy (as being both static and dynamic), and practical implications for memory athletes and educational settings alike: The method of loci and use of animate imagery can be taught easily, and they produce high levels of recall.