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Disentangling five dimensions of animacy in human brain and behaviour

View ORCID ProfileKamila M Jozwik, Elias Najarro, Jasper JF van den Bosch, Ian Charest, Radoslaw M Cichy, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.09.12.459854
Kamila M Jozwik
1University of Cambridge, Department of Psychology, Cambridge, UK
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  • For correspondence: jozwik.kamila@gmail.com
Elias Najarro
2IT University of Copenhagen, Digital Design Department, Copenhagen, Denmark
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Jasper JF van den Bosch
3University of Birmingham, School of Psychology, Birmingham, UK
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Ian Charest
3University of Birmingham, School of Psychology, Birmingham, UK
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Radoslaw M Cichy
4Freie Universität Berlin, Department of Education and Psychology, Berlin, Germany
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Nikolaus Kriegeskorte
5Columbia University, Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Department of Psychology, Department of Neuroscience, Department of Electrical Engineering, New York, USA
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Abstract

Distinguishing animate from inanimate things is of great behavioural importance. Despite distinct brain and behavioural responses to animate and inanimate things, it remains unclear which object properties drive these responses. Here, we investigate the importance of five object dimensions related to animacy (“being alive”, “looking like an animal”, “having agency”, “having mobility”, and “being unpredictable”) in brain (fMRI, EEG) and behaviour (property and similarity judgements) of 19 participants. We used a stimulus set of 128 images, optimized by a genetic algorithm to disentangle these five dimensions. The five dimensions explained much variance in the similarity judgments. Each dimension also explained a modest but significant amount of variance in the brain representations, except, surprisingly, “being alive”. Different brain regions sensitive to animacy may represent distinct dimensions, either as accessible perceptual stepping stones toward detecting whether something is alive or because they are of behavioural importance in their own right.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • added supplementary materials, adjusted text

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted August 31, 2022.
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Disentangling five dimensions of animacy in human brain and behaviour
Kamila M Jozwik, Elias Najarro, Jasper JF van den Bosch, Ian Charest, Radoslaw M Cichy, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte
bioRxiv 2021.09.12.459854; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.09.12.459854
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Disentangling five dimensions of animacy in human brain and behaviour
Kamila M Jozwik, Elias Najarro, Jasper JF van den Bosch, Ian Charest, Radoslaw M Cichy, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte
bioRxiv 2021.09.12.459854; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.09.12.459854

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