Movement properties that provoke mental inference
Chapter 12 endnote 51, from How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Some context is:
Even Heider’s and Simmel’s shapes seem human-like, because their speed and trajectories are reminiscent of people chasing one another. [...] The similarities to humans can be simple.
Simple features of an object — such as its speed of movement (if it is similar to a human's speed), or whether objects chase and follow one another, or if they move around apparent obstacles — can make an object seem as if it has a mind.[1] When we perceive animals such as dogs, wolves, lions, horses, and rats moving at the same speed as a human, then we also are more likely to believe they have minds.[2] That’s one reason the Heider and Simmel movies are so effective; even 13-month-old children make inferences about moving circles and triangles.[3] This reveals that our concepts contain information like the speed of movement and the spatial relations between objects as they dynamically change over time.
Notes on the Notes
- ↑ Opfer, John E. 2002. "Identifying living and sentient kinds from dynamic information: The case of goal-directed versus aimless autonomous movement in conceptual change." Cognition 86 (2): 97-122.
- ↑ Morewedge, Carey K., Jesse Preston, and Daniel M. Wegner. 2007. "Timescale bias in the attribution of mind." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 93 (1): 1-11.
- ↑ Southgate, Victoria, and Gergely Csibra. 2009. "Inferring the outcome of an ongoing novel action at 13 months." Developmental psychology 45 (6): 1794-1798.