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Animacy ratings. a. Order of images with lowest and highest ratings on each animacy dimension. Out of 128 images, we show 10 lowest and 10 highest rated images on each animacy dimension (images containing a human face are replaced by grey squares according to bioRxiv's policy on images of individuals). b. Animacy dimension RDMs comparisons with animacy ratings ("being animate") RDMs. Bars show the correlation between the animacy ratings RDMs and each animacy dimension RDM. A significant correlation is indicated by an asterisk (one-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank test, p < 0.05 corrected). Error bars show the standard error of the mean based on single-participant correlations, i.e., correlations between the single-participant animacy ratings RDMs and animacy dimension RDM. The grey bar represents the noise ceiling, which indicates the expected performance
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The perception of animate things is of great behavioural importance to humans. Despite the prominence of the distinct brain and behavioural responses to animate and inanimate things, however, it remains unclear which of several commonly entangled properties underlie these observations. Here, we investigate the importance of five dimensions of anima...
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... gain more intuition about what stimuli are considered to have the highest value on each animacy dimension, we visualized 10 object images with the overall minimum and 10 with the maximum rating on a given dimension ( Figure 4a). Overall, images that had low values on animacy dimension ratings were similar among dimensions (e.g., plush toys, meat, washing machine). ...
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... all the dimensions, "having agency" and "being alive" explained more variance than other dimensions (Figure 4b) in animacy ratings (when participants were asked to judge how animate an object image was). This result means that when asked to judge animacy humans mostly think about whether an object is alive and whether it has agency. ...
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... https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.09.12.459854 doi: bioRxiv preprint agency" and "being alive" explain more variance than the other dimensions, it does not mean that they explain unique variance. To test that, we performed a unique variance analysis (see Methods for details) and observed that only one dimension, "being alive", explains significantly more unique variance than "having agency" and "being unpredictable" dimensions ( Figure 4c). "Being alive" is one of the dimensions that explain the most variance in animacy ratings and also the only dimension that explains significantly more unique variance than some of the other dimensions. ...
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... example, object images of most robots, fetuses, and a human on life support were grouped, with human images separated but placed close to an image of a realistic humanoid robot. This grouping is related to the agency dimension as these images received the highest rating on "having agency" dimension ( Figure 4a). Animal robots formed their own cluster together with other moving objects such as boomerangs, balls, and buses. ...
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... dimension RDMs comparisons with similarity judgements RDMs. Bars show the correlation between the similarity judgements RDMs and each animacy dimension RDM using the same conventions as in Figure 4b. d. ...
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Objects are the core meaningful elements in our visual environment. Classic theories of object vision focus upon object recognition and are elegant and simple. Some of their proposals still stand, yet the simplicity is gone. Recent evolutions in behavioral paradigms, neuroscientific methods, and computational modeling have allowed vision scientists to uncover the complexity of the multidimensional representational space that underlies object vision. We review these findings and propose that the key to understanding this complexity is to relate object vision to the full repertoire of behavioral goals that underlie human behavior, running far beyond object recognition. There might be no such thing as core object recognition, and if it exists, then its importance is more limited than traditionally thought.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 74 is January 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
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.
[Note. This is version 3. About a half dozen new animacy neuroscience studies have been added, mostly to Supplementary Data File 2. The new studies do not seem to affect the original version 1 and 2 identification of the extended network nodes.]
A review of neuroscience neuroimaging research on animacy indicates the existence of an Extended Animacy Network (ExtAN) distinct from cognitive theory of mind, agency, action representation and social cognition networks. Prior reviews have focused on posterior areas for biomotion. A pattern-analysis of 157 neuroimaging articles indicates this ExtAN has twenty-five nodes, fifteen right hemisphere and ten left, extending from posterior to anterior cortex and across limbic areas. Neural coordinates and functions are provided for each node. In general, the ExtAN activates during perceiving and expressing the salience, value, quality and degree or intensity of life, aliveness and life-energy.
ExtAN functions include: animacy inference and imagining, especially imperatives; visual communicative gesture reading, especially live biomotion; linguistic animacy; attending to motion target intention changing, e.g., predator/prey; human biomotion, liveliness, more than non-human; perception of biological forms; interpersonal dyadic biomotion; semantic distinction between living versus non-living, life versus death; personal life continuity into the future; processing own immediate relationship to life aliveness; life-force; and existential mortality threat and death anxiety.
The extended animacy network is the neural substrate for the ontological region of life-experience, life-force and the life-concept. Identification and clarification of the ExtAN is essential for developing any future comprehensive philosophical ontology, theology of life, and clarification of its ontological difference from spirituality and religion; social and moral; and psychological regions.
Findings have implications for characterizing the concepts of animacy and life in neuroscience, biology, psychology, religious studies and anthropology of religion, and evolution of culture.
