Animacy Perception Based on One-Dimensional Movement of a Single Dot

How humans perceive animacy based on movement is not well understood. In the present study, we conducted an experiment to investigate how humans perceive animacy based on the one-dimensional movement of a single dot. Ten participants were asked to generate 60 s of one-dimensional movement with three assumptions: randomness, inanimacy and animacy. The time-series analysis revealed that the movements generated with the assumption of randomness were similar to white noise, the movements generated with the assumption of inanimacy were periodic, and the power spectra of the movements generated with the assumption of animacy were located between pink and brown noise with trajectories with autocorrelations but no clear periodicity.