Which Motion Features Induce the Perception of Animacy ?

The perception of animacy is one of the fundamental social skills possessed by humans. The aim of this study is to determine whether such a skill can be accurately reproduced computationally, and if so, to describe the underlying factors which contribute to the animacy decision. We hypothesize a set of motion features which lead to such a distinction, construct a database of sample movements from both synthetic and natural stimuli, collect human judgments on the animacy of these stimuli, and evaluate the effectiveness of a computational system trained on this data to discriminate animacy.

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