RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Disentangling five dimensions of animacy in human brain and behaviour
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.09.12.459854
DO 10.1101/2021.09.12.459854
A1 Kamila M Jozwik
A1 Elias Najarro
A1 Jasper JF van den Bosch
A1 Ian Charest
A1 Radoslaw M Cichy
A1 Nikolaus Kriegeskorte
YR 2022
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/08/31/2021.09.12.459854.abstract
AB 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 StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.