Perceptual causality and animacy

Certain simple visual displays consisting of moving 2-D geometric shapes can give rise to percepts with high-level properties such as causality and animacy. This article reviews recent research on such phenomena, which began with the classic work of Michotte and of Heider and Simmel. The importance of such phenomena stems in part from the fact that these interpretations seem to be largely perceptual in nature - to be fairly fast, automatic, irresistible and highly stimulus driven - despite the fact that they involve impressions typically associated with higher-level cognitive processing. This research suggests that just as the visual system works to recover the physical structure of the world by inferring properties such as 3-D shape, so too does it work to recover the causal and social structure of the world by inferring properties such as causality and animacy.     

Multiple object tracking in people with Williams syndrome and in normally developing children

Multiple object tracking is hypothesized to utilize visual indexes, which may provide rapid, parallel access to a limited number of visual objects, thereby supporting a variety of spatial tasks. We examined whether faulty indexing might play a role in the severe visuospatial deficits found in Williams syndrome. We asked observers to track from one to four targets in a display of eight identical objects. Objects remained stationary (static condition) or moved randomly and independently (moving condition) for 6 s, after which observers pointed to the objects they thought were targets. People with Williams syndrome were impaired in the moving condition, but not the static condition, compared with mental-age-matched control participants. Normal children who were younger than the mental-age-matched control children did not show the same profile as individuals with Williams syndrome, which suggests that the difference between the tasks in Williams syndrome did not reflect simple developmental immaturity. Error analysis revealed that all groups had "slippery" indexes, falsely identifying target neighbors, and further suggested that people with Williams syndrome deploy fewer indexes than do people without this disorder.     

Categorizing moving objects into film genres: The effect of animacy attribution,emotional response,and the deviation from non-fiction

The reported study follows the footsteps of Heider, and Simmel (1944) [Heider, F., & Simmel, M. (1944). An experimental study of apparent behavior. American Journal of Psychology, 57, 243–249] and Michotte (1946/1963) [Michotte, A. (1963). The perception of causality (T.R. Miles & E. Miles, Trans.). London: Methuen (Original work published 1946)] who demonstrated the role of object movement in attributions of life-likeness to figures. It goes one step further in studying the categorization of film scenes as to genre as a function of object movements.In an animated film scene portraying a chase, movements of the chasing object were systematically varied as to parameters: velocity, efficiency, fluency, detail, and deformation.The object movements were categorized by viewers into genres: non-fiction, comedy, drama, and action. Besides this categorization, viewers rated their animacy attribution and emotional response. Results showed that non-expert viewers were consistent in categorizing the genres according to object movement parameters. The size of its deviation from the unmanipulated movement scene determined the assignment of any target scene to one of the fiction genres: small and moderate deviations resulted in categorization as drama and action, and large deviations as comedy. The results suggest that genre classification is achieved by, at least, three distinct cognitive processes: (a) animacy attribution, which influences the fiction versus non-fiction classification; (b) emotional responses, which influences the classification of a specific fiction genre; and (c) the amount of deviation from reality, at least with regard to movements.     

Human heading judgments in the presence of moving objects

When moving toward a stationary scene, people judge their heading quite well from visual information alone. Much experimental and modeling work has been presented to analyze how people judge their heading for stationary scenes. However, in everyday life, we often move through scenes that contain moving objects. Most models have difficulty computing heading when moving objects are in the scene, and few studies have examined how well humans perform in the presence of moving objects. In this study, we tested how well people judge their heading in the presence of moving objects. We found that people perform remarkably well under a variety of conditions. The only condition that affects an observer’s ability to judge heading accurately consists of a large moving object crossing the observer’s path. In this case, the presence of the object causes a small bias in the heading judgments. For objects moving horizontally with respect to the observer, this bias is in the object’s direction of motion. These results present a challenge for computational models.     

Social attention and real-world scenes: the roles of action, competition and social content

The present study examined how social attention is influenced by social content and the presence of items that are available for attention. We monitored observers' eye movements while they freely viewed real-world social scenes containing either 1 or 3 people situated among a variety of objects. Building from the work of Yarbus (1965/1967) we hypothesized that observers would demonstrate a preferential bias to fixate the eyes of the people in the scene, although other items would also receive attention. In addition, we hypothesized that fixations to the eyes would increase as the social content (i.e., number of people) increased. Both hypotheses were supported by the data, and we also found that the level of activity in the scene influenced attention to eyes when social content was high. The present results provide support for the notion that the eyes are selected by others in order to extract social information. Our study also suggests a simple and surreptitious methodology for studying social attention to real-world stimuli in a range of populations, such as those with autism spectrum disorders.     

Social attention and real-world scenes: The roles of action,competition and social content

The present study examined how social attention is influenced by social content and the presence of items that are available for attention. We monitored observers' eye movements while they freely viewed real-world social scenes containing either 1 or 3 people situated among a variety of objects. Building from the work of Yarbus (1965/1967) we hypothesized that observers would demonstrate a preferential bias to fixate the eyes of the people in the scene, although other items would also receive attention. In addition, we hypothesized that fixations to the eyes would increase as the social content (i.e., number of people) increased. Both hypotheses were supported by the data, and we also found that the level of activity in the scene influenced attention to eyes when social content was high. The present results provide support for the notion that the eyes are selected by others in order to extract social information. Our study also suggests a simple and surreptitious methodology for studying social attention to real-world stimuli in a range of populations, such as those with autism spectrum disorders.     

Why do we punish groups? High entitativity promotes moral suspicion

People typically take a moral deservingness perspective when deciding on appropriate punishment for intentional wrongdoings committed by individuals. Considerably less is known about how people reason about wrongdoings committed by groups, even though there are fundamental differences in how people perceive individuals versus groups. The present research examined perceived entitativity, the degree to which a group is perceived to be a unified, single agent, as a potential determinant of moral reasoning about transgressions committed by groups. We found that participants recommended more severe punishments for high entitativity (vs. low entitativity) perpetrator groups, particularly in the presence of morally mitigating circumstances that typically lessen punitiveness. This effect was mediated by perceptions of greater moral accountability in high-entitativity groups. Thus, justice is not equal for all groups. Implications for retributive justice and the criminal justice system are discussed.     

Constraints on Multiple Object Tracking in Williams Syndrome: How Atypical Development Can Inform Theories of Visual Processing

The ability to track moving objects is a crucial skill for performance in everyday spatial tasks. The tracking mechanism depends on representation of moving items as coherent entities, which follow the spatiotemporal constraints of objects in the world. In the present experiment, participants tracked 1 to 4 targets in a display of 8 identical objects. Objects moved randomly and independently (moving condition), passed behind an invisible bar (occluded condition), or momentarily disappeared by shrinking (implosion condition). Scholl and Pylyshyn (1999) found that adults can track entities under the moving and occluded conditions, but not under implosion. This finding suggests that the tracking mechanism is constrained by the spatiotemporal properties of physical objects as they move in the world. In the present study, we adapt these conditions to investigate whether this constraint holds for people with severe spatial impairments associated with Williams syndrome (WS). In Experiment 1, we compare the performance of individuals with WS and typically developing (TD) adults. TD adults replicated Scholl and Pylyshyn’s findings; performance was no different between the moving and occluded conditions but was worse under implosion. People with WS had reduced tracking capacity but demonstrated the same pattern across conditions. In Experiment 2, we tested TD 4-, 5-, and 7-year-olds. People with WS performed at a level that fell between TD 4- and 5-year-olds. These results suggest that the multiple object tracking system in WS operates under the same object-based constraints that hold in typical development.     

Naive physics: the curvilinear impetus principle and its role in interactions with moving objects

Several recent studies in which subjects solved pencil-and-paper problems concerning the behavior of moving objects have shown that many people have incorrect beliefs about motion. The present study considers the question of whether these naive beliefs are manifested in situations where people observe and interact with moving objects. Several findings in the problem-solving literature suggest that abstract or unrealistic tasks may fail to tap knowledge and reasoning abilities that are routinely used in more concrete or realistic situations. Thus, most people may have accurate knowledge about the behavior of moving objects, knowledge that they use in their everyday interactions with objects in motion. However, this knowledge may not be activated in the context of abstract, static problems, and as a result people attempting to solve such problems may resort to naive beliefs. Three experiments examine this possibility in the context of one specific naive belief, the curvilinear impetus belief. Contrary to expectations, results suggest that the curvilinear impetus belief is used not only on pencil-and-paper problems but also in situations where people observe and interact with moving objects. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Ownership and object history

Appropriate behavior in relation to an object often requires judging whether it is owned and, if so, by whom. The authors propose accounts of how people make these judgments. Our central claim is that both judgments often involve making inferences about object history. In judging whether objects are owned, people may assume that artifacts (e.g., chairs) are owned and that natural objects (e.g., pinecones) are not. However, people may override these assumptions by inferring the history of intentional acts made in relation to objects. In judging who owns an object, people may often consider which person likely possessed the object in the past--such reasoning may be responsible for people's bias to assume that the first person known to possess an object is its owner.     

Event memory and moving in a well-known environment

Research in narrative comprehension has repeatedly shown that when people read about characters moving in well-known environments, the accessibility of object information follows a spatial gradient. That is, the accessibility of objects is best when they are in the same room as the protagonist, and it becomes worse the farther away they are see, e.g., Morrow, Greenspan, & Bower, (Journal of Memory and Language, 26, 165–187, 1987). In the present study, we assessed this finding using an interactive environment in which we had people memorize a map and navigate a virtual simulation of the area. During navigation, people were probed with pairs of object names and indicated whether both objects were in the same room. In contrast to the narrative studies described above, several experiments showed no evidence of a clear spatial gradient. Instead, memory for objects in currently occupied locations (e.g., the location room) was more accessible, especially after a small delay, but no clear decline was evident in the accessibility of information in memory with increased distance. Also, memory for objects along the pathway of movement (i.e., rooms that a person only passed through) showed a transitory suppression effect that was present immediately after movement, but attenuated over time. These results were interpreted in light of the event horizon model of event cognition.     

Depth representation of moving 3-D objects in apparent-motion path

Apparent motion is perceived when two objects are presented alternately at different positions. The internal representations of apparently moving objects are formed in an apparent-motion path which lacks physical inputs. We investigated the depth information contained in the representation of 3-D moving objects in an apparent-motion path. We examined how probe objects-briefly placed in the motion path-affected the perceived smoothness of apparent motion. The probe objects comprised 3-D objects which were defined by being shaded or by disparity (convex/concave) or 2-D (flat) objects, while the moving objects were convex/concave objects. We found that flat probe objects induced a significantly smoother motion perception than concave probe objects only in the case of the convex moving objects. However, convex probe objects did not lead to smoother motion as the flat objects did, although the convex probe objects contained the same depth information for the moving objects. Moreover, the difference between probe objects was reduced when the moving objects were concave. These counterintuitive results were consistent in conditions when both depth cues were used. The results suggest that internal representations contain incomplete depth information that is intermediate between that of 2-D and 3-D objects.     

Attribution of meaning from movement of simple objects

Many researchers claim that attribution of meaning to movement is based prevalently on the properties of the kinetic pattern. Using a constant kinetic pattern, the present study examined the possible influence of shape, size, luminance, and hue of the moving objects on the attribution of meaning. A significant influence of the shape and luminance of the moving objects on the expressivity of the kinetic pattern was found. This influence is probably due to the fact that the kinetic conditions were not unequivocal and specific and so easily influenced by some figural properties. The hue and size of the moving objects seemed instead to have little importance in the attribution of meaning to movement. The need for further investigation to assess the influence of the properties of the kinetic pattern on the perception of a mechanical, intentional, or expressive event is suggested.     

Are objects required for object-files? Roles of segmentation and spatiotemporal continuity in computing object persistence

Two central tasks of visual processing are (1) to segment undifferentiated retinal images into discrete objects, and (2) to represent those objects as the same persisting individuals over time and motion. Here we explore the interaction of these two types of processing in the context of object files—mid-level visual representations that “stick” to moving objects on the basis of spatiotemporal properties. Object files can be revealed by object-specific preview benefits (OSPBs), wherein a “preview” of information on a moving object speeds the recognition of that information at a later point when it appears again on the same object (compared to when it reappears on a different moving object), beyond display-wide priming. Here we explore the degree of segmentation required to establish object files in the first place. Surprisingly, we find that no explicit segmentation is required until after the previews disappear, when using purely motion-defined objects (consisting of random elements on a random background). Moreover, OSPBs are observed in such displays even after moderate (but not long) delays between the offset of the preview information and the onset of the motion. These effects indicate that object files can be established without initial static segmentation cues, so long as there is spatiotemporal continuity between the previews and the eventual appearance of the objects. We also find that top-down strategies can sometimes mimic OSPBs, but that these strategies can be eliminated by novel manipulations. We discuss how these results alter our understanding of the nature of object files, and also why researchers must take care to distinguish “true OSPBs” from “illusory OSPBs”.     

Mind and movement

Voluntary movements embrace both intentional, conscious and post-intentional, largely automatic processes. Here, we examine these types of processes and the relations between them during preparation and execution of voluntary movements. First, a general overview is given about how intentional and post-intentional components are interleaved to enable successful control of purposeful movements. Second, we briefly describe some post-intentional processes that are triggered by preceding intentions. Third, we discuss findings according to which such post-intentional processes or their results can become accessible to conscious awareness. Under such conditions, automatic and conscious processes can co-occur. We show that intentional interventions into post-intentional processes can be overridden by automatic processes, can interfere with automatic processes and can be independent so that their outcomes add to those of automatic processes.     

Intuitive physics: the straight-down belief and its origin

This study examines the nature and origin of a common misconception about moving objects. We first show through the use of pencil-and-paper problems that many people erroneously believe that an object that is carried by another moving object (e.g., a ball carried by a walking person) will, if dropped, fall to the ground in a straight vertical line. (In fact, such an object will fall forward in a parabolic arc.) We then demonstrate that this "straight-down belief" turns up not only on pencil-and-paper problems but also on a problem presented in a concrete, dynamic fashion (Experiment 1) and in a situation in which a subject drops a ball while walking (Experiment 2). We next consider the origin of the straight-down belief and propose that the belief may stem from a perceptual illusion. Specifically, we suggest that objects dropped from a moving carrier may be perceived as falling straight down or even backward, when in fact they move forward as they fall. Experiment 3, in which subjects view computer-generated displays simulating situations in which a carried object is dropped, and Experiment 4, in which subjects view a videotape of a walking person dropping an object, provide data consistent with this "seeing is believing" hypothesis.     

Body-based perceptual rescaling revealed through the size-weight illusion

An embodied approach to the perception of spatial layout contends that the body is used as a 'perceptual ruler' with which individuals scale the perceived environmental layout. In support of this notion, previous research has shown that the perceived size of objects can be influenced by changes in the apparent size of hand. The size-weight illusion is a well known phenomenon, which occurs when people lift two objects of equal weight but differing sizes and perceive that the larger object feels lighter. Therefore, if apparent hand size influences perceived object size, it should also influence the object's perceived weight. In this study, we investigated this possibility by using perceived weight as a measure and found that changes in the apparent size of the hand influence objects' perceived weight.     

归类优势与基本水平效应的再探讨

类别特异性分数是预测归类优势的有效指标。实验1考察该分数能否预测基本水平归类优势, 结果：分数较高的表现归类优势。实验2检验有归类优势的下位类别的分数, 结果：它们都有较高分数, 同时发现下位类别的特异性可以影响分数。实验3探讨相同的基本水平与特异性不同的下位组合的归类表现, 结果：下位特异性低就表现基本水平归类优势, 高则相反。据此提出“经验说”, 分数高低与人们在经验中对各层次类别形成的表征特异性程度相关。     

Self-awareness as conscious meta-representation

Citing the phenomenon of transparency, some philosophers argue that we cannot become aware of the intrinsic properties of our experiences. When we introspect, they argue, our experiences always seem as if they are exhausted by their intentional contents. They conclude that introspection does not reveal any properties that seem intrinsic to experience. In order to answer this argument, we must show how it could seem as if we are simultaneously aware of external objects and our experience of those objects. I explain how this is possible by introducing the notion of conscious meta-representation. Conscious meta-representation occurs when we consciously conceive of represented objects as being merely putative. This sort of conceiving sometimes involves a distinctive phenomenology, and it explains how certain features of an experience can simultaneously seem as if they belong to external objects and to our experiences of those objects. We can, I conclude, look ‘at’ our experiences even as we are looking ‘through’ them.     

A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion

We obtained the first evidence of a facial expression unique to contempt. Contrary to our prediction, this contempt expression was not culture-specific but was recognized by people in Estonia S.S.R., Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Scotland, Turkey, the United States, and West Sumatra. Pan-cultural agreement about the contempt expression was as high as has been found previously for other emotions.We are grateful to our collaborators, Anthony Chan, Karl Heider, Rainer Krause, Rolf Kuschel, Ayhan LeCompte, Tom Pitcairn, Pio Ricci-Bitti, Klaus Scherer, Masatoshi Tomita, Athanase Tzavaras, Arnold Upmeyer, and Jaan Valsiner; to Maureen O'Sullivan for comments on this report. Paul Ekman's work is supported by a Research Scientist Award (MH 06092) from the National Institute of Mental Health.