Discriminating Animate from Inanimate Visual Stimuli

From as early as 6 months of age, human children distinguish between motion patterns generated by animate objects from patterns generated by moving inanimate objects, even when the only stimulus that the child observes is a single point of light moving against a blank background. The mechanisms by which the animate/inanimate distinction are made are unknown, but have been shown to rely only upon the spatial and temporal properties of the movement. In this paper, I present both a multiagent architecture that performs this classification as well as detailed comparisons of the individual agent contributions against human baselines.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: IJCAI
• Authors: Brian Scassellati
• Keywords: Human Children, IJCAI 2001, IJCAI 2007, Inanimate Objects, Motion Patterns