Identifying critical kinematic features of animate motion and contribution to animacy perception
Yifei Han,
Wenhao Han,
Liang Li,
Tao Zhang,
Yizheng Wang
Affiliations
Yifei Han
State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Department of Psychology, Beijing 100049, China
Wenhao Han
State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Department of Psychology, Beijing 100049, China
Liang Li
The Brain Science Center, Beijing Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, Beijing 100850, China; Corresponding author
Tao Zhang
State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Department of Psychology, Beijing 100049, China; Corresponding author
Yizheng Wang
The Brain Science Center, Beijing Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, Beijing 100850, China; National Clinical Research Center for Aging and Medicine, Huashan Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai 200040, China; State Key Laboratory of Medical Neurobiology and MOE Frontiers Center for Brain Science, Institutes of Brain Science, Fudan University, Shanghai 200032, China
Summary: Humans can distinguish flying birds from drones based solely on motion features when no image information is available. However, it remains unclear which motion features of animate motion induce our animacy perception. To address this, we first analyzed the differences in centroid motion between birds and drones, and discovered that birds exhibit greater acceleration, angular speed, and trajectory fluctuations. We further determined the order of their importance in evoking animacy perception was trajectory fluctuations, acceleration, and speed. More interestingly, people judge whether a moving object is alive using a feature-matching strategy, implying that animacy perception is induced in a key feature-triggered way rather than relying on the accumulation of evidence. Our findings not only shed light on the critical motion features that induce animacy perception and their relative contributions but also have important implications for developing target classification algorithms based on motion features.
