The wolfpack effect: Perception of animacy irresistibly influences interactive behavior

Psychological Science

Volumn 21, Issue 12, 2010, Pages 1845-1853

  Gao, Tao ^a   McCarthy, Gregory ^a   Scholl, Brian J ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

agency; chasing; event perception; goal directed behavior; intention; perception of animacy; social perception

Indexed keywords

ANIMAL; ARTICLE; ASSOCIATION; ATTENTION; BEHAVIOR; COMPUTER INTERFACE; COMPUTER SIMULATION; HUMAN; MOTION; MOVEMENT PERCEPTION; PHOTOSTIMULATION; PREDATION; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR;

ANIMALS; ATTENTION; COMPUTER SIMULATION; CUES; HUMANS; INTENTION; MOTION; MOTION PERCEPTION; PHOTIC STIMULATION; PREDATORY BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR; USER-COMPUTER INTERFACE;

EID: 78650405515     PISSN: 09567976     EISSN: 14679280     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0956797610388814     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. Abell, F., Happé, F., & Frith, U. (2000). Do triangles play tricks? Attribution of mental states to animated shapes in normal and abnormal development. Journal of Cognitive Development, 15, 1-16.
2. Barrett, H.C., Todd, P.M., Miller, G.F., & Blythe, P. (2005). Accurate judgments of intention from motion alone: A cross-cultural study. Evolution and Human Behavior, 26, 313-331.
3. Bassili, J. (1976). Temporal and spatial contingencies in the perception of social events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 33, 680-685.
4. Blakemore, S.-J., Boyer, P., Pachot-Clouard, M., Meltzoff, A., Segebarth, C., & Decety, J. (2003). The detection of contingency and animacy from simple animations in the human brain. Cerebral Cortex, 13, 837-844.
5. Blythe, P.W., Todd, P.M., & Miller, G.F. (1999). How motion reveals intention: Categorizing social interactions. In G. Gigerenzer, P.M. Todd, & the ABC Research Group (Eds.), Simple heuristics that make us smart (pp. 257-286). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
6. Brainard, D. (1997). The Psychophysics Toolbox. Spatial Vision, 10, 433-436.
7. Castelli, F., Happé, F., Frith, U., & Frith, C. (2000). Movement and mind: A functional imaging study of perception and interpretation of complex intentional movement patterns. NeuroImage, 12, 314-325.
8. Cosman, J., & Vecera, S. (2009). Perceptual load modulates attentional capture by abrupt onsets. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16, 404-410.
9. Crick, C., & Scassellati, B. (2008, August). Inferring narrative and intention from playground games. Paper presented at the 7th IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning, Monterrey, CA.
10. Csibra, G. (2008). Goal attribution to inanimate agents by 6.5-month-old infants. Cognition, 107, 705-717.
11. Dasser, V., Ulbaek, I., & Premack, D. (1989). The perception of intention. Science, 243, 365-367.
12. Dittrich, W., & Lea, S. (1994). Visual perception of intentional motion. Perception, 23, 253-268.
13. Gao, T., Newman, G.E., & Scholl, B.J. (2009). The psychophysics of chasing: A case study in the perception of animacy. Cognitive Psychology, 59, 154-179.
14. Gaur, V., & Scassellati, B. (2006, May). Which motion features induce the perception of animacy? Paper presented at the 2006 International Conference for Developmental Learning, Bloomington, IN.
15. Gelman, R., Durgin, F., & Kaufman, L. (1995). Distinguishing between animates and inanimates: Not by motion alone. In D. Sperber, D. Premack, & A.J. Premack (Eds.), Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate (pp. 150-184). Oxford, England: Clarendon Press.
16. Gergely, G., & Csibra, G. (2003). Teleological reasoning in infancy: The naïve theory of rational action. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 287-292.
17. Gergely, G., Ná;dasdy, Z., Csibra, G., & Bíró, S. (1995). Taking the intentional stance at 12 months of age. Cognition, 56, 165-193.
18. Heberlein, A.S., & Adolphs, R. (2004). Impaired spontaneous anthropomorphizing despite intact perception and social knowledge. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 101, 7487-7491.
19. Heider, F., & Simmel, M. (1944). An experimental study of apparent behavior. American Journal of Psychology, 57, 243-259.
20. Klin, A. (2000). Attributing social meaning to ambiguous visual stimuli in higher functioning autism and Asperger syndrome: The social attribution task. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 41, 831-846.
21. Mar, R.A., & Macrae, C.N. (2006). Triggering the intentional stance. In G. Bock & J. Goode (Eds.), Empathy and fairness (Novartis Foundation Symposium No. 278, pp. 110-119). Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons.
22. Michotte, A. (1991). The emotions regarded as functional connections. In G. Thinés, A. Costall, & G. Butterworth (Eds.), Michotte's experimental phenomenology of perception (pp. 103- 116). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. (Reprinted from Feelings and emotions: The Mooseheart symposium, pp. 114-125, by M. Reymert, Ed., 1950, New York, NY: McGraw-Hill).
23. Nahin, P.J. (2007). Chases and escapes: The mathematics of pursuit and evasion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
24. Opfer, J. (2002). Identifying living and sentient kinds from dynamic information: The case of goal-directed versus aimless autonomous movement in conceptual change. Cognition, 86, 97-122.
25. Pelli, D. (1997). The VideoToolbox software for visual psychophysics: Transforming numbers into movies. Spatial Vision, 10, 437-442.
26. Rochat, P., Morgan, R., & Carpenter, M. (1997). Young infants' sensitivity to movement information specifying social causality. Cognitive Development, 12, 537-561.
27. Rochat, P., Striano, T., & Morgan, R. (2004). Who is doing what to whom? Young infants' developing sense of social causality in animated displays. Perception, 33, 355-369.
28. Santos, N.S., David, N., Bente, G., & Vogeley, K. (2008). Parametric induction of animacy experience. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 425-437.
29. Scholl, B.J., & Tremoulet, P. (2000). Perceptual causality and animacy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 299-309.
30. Schultz, J., Friston, K.J., O'Doherty, J., Wolpert, D.M., & Frith, C.D. (2005). Activation in posterior superior temporal sulcus parallels parameter inducing the percept of animacy. Neuron, 45, 147-156.
31. Schultz, J., Imamizu, H., Kawato, M., & Frith, C.D. (2004). Activation of the human superior temporal gyrus during observation of goal attribution by intentional objects. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16, 1695-1705.
32. Tavares, P., Lawrence, A., & Barnard, P. (2008). Paying attention to social meaning: An fMRI study. Cerebral Cortex, 18, 1876-1885.
33. Tremoulet, P.D., & Feldman, J. (2000). Perception of animacy from the motion of a single object. Perception, 29, 943-951.
34. Tremoulet, P.D., & Feldman, J. (2006). The influence of spatial context and the role of intentionality in the interpretation of animacy from motion. Perception & Psychophysics, 68, 1047-1058.
35. Wheatley, T., Milleville, S.C., & Martin, A. (2007). Understanding animate agents: Distinct roles for the social network and mirror system. Psychological Science, 18, 469-474.
36. Yantis, S. (1993). Stimulus-driven attentional capture. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2, 156-161.
37. Yantis, S., & Jonides, J. (1984). Abrupt onsets and selective attention: Evidence from visual search. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 10, 601-621.