Project description

Human observers tend to perceive simple geometric shapes that move spatio-temporarilly coordinated as if they were alive (Heider & Simmel, 1944, The American Journal of Psychology, 57, 243-259). This phenomenon is called perceptual animacy. Although perceptual animacy has been studied for over 60 years, it has not yet been linked to other psychological concepts such as attention. This research gap arises from difficulties in quantifying animate impressions.

The aim of this project was to link spatial and temporal features of perceptual animacy to visual attention. We combined paradigms from research on visual attention with depictions of abstract patterns of intentional motion (Gao, Newman & Scholl, 2009, Cognitive Psychology, 59, 154-179). Up to now, our results showed that detecting intentional motion pattern is a two-stage process. First, spatial attributes of the patterns of motion - such as the reduced spatial distance between interacting objects - guide visual attention toward the relevant stimuli. Only thereafter, the intentional content arises from the attended objects.