Abstract
Humans tend to perceive inanimate objects as animate based on simple motion cues. So far this perceptual bias has been studied mostly in humans by utilizing two-dimensional video and interactive displays. Considering its importance for survival, the perception of animacy is probably also widespread among animals, however two-dimensional displays are not necessarily the best approach to study the phenomenon in non-human species. Here we applied a novel method to study whether dogs recognize a dependent (chasing-like) movement pattern performed by inanimate agents in live demonstration. We found that dogs showed more interest toward the agents that demonstrated the chasing-like motion, compared to those that were involved in the independent movement. We suggest that dogs spontaneously recognized the chasing-like pattern and thus they may have considered the interacting partners as animate agents. This methodological approach may be useful to test perceptual animacy in other non-human species.
Highlights
Attribution of animacy or psychological traits to inanimate agents seems to be a general phenomenon in humans starting early during ontogeny (e.g. [1,2,3,4,5])
Tremoulet & Feldman [6] showed that even a single moving geometric figure can be identified by adult observers as animate based on simple motion cues
Recent research found that newborn human infants are already sensitive to self-propelledness [5], and newly hatched, naïve domestic chicks (Gallus gallus domesticus) prefer self-propelled geometric figures to those moving with constant speed or their motion is the result of physical contact [7,8]. It seems that there are inborn predispositions to these cues that may be widespread in vertebrates apart from the fact that basic motion cues of animacy are sufficient to trigger the perception of animacy [5,7,9]
Summary
Attribution of animacy or psychological traits to inanimate agents seems to be a general phenomenon in humans starting early during ontogeny (e.g. [1,2,3,4,5]). Recent research found that newborn human infants are already sensitive to self-propelledness [5], and newly hatched, naïve domestic chicks (Gallus gallus domesticus) prefer self-propelled geometric figures to those moving with constant speed or their motion is the result of physical contact [7,8]. It seems that there are inborn predispositions to these cues that may be widespread in vertebrates apart from the fact that basic motion cues of animacy are sufficient to trigger the perception of animacy [5,7,9] (but see [10,11]). Only limited amount of studies investigated this phenomenon in non-human species (e.g. [7,16,17])
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