Objects from the ‘past’ are present all around us, everyday of our lives. It is through interaction with these objects that we glean an interpretation of ‘things which came before’. But we must ask – can artefacts act? Can they speak? A new field of study has been put forth by scholars at previous academic meetings discussing the theory of object agency; however, at the same time, it is admitte...

BACKGROUND Capgras delusion is a delusional misidentification syndrome, in which the patient is convinced that someone that is well known to them, usually a close relative, has been replaced by an impostor or double. Although it has been frequently described in psychotic syndromes, including paranoid schizophrenia, over a third of the documented cases of Capgras delusion are observed in patient...

In classic demonstrations of apparent motion, observers typically report seeing motion along the shortest possible path between 2 sequentially presented objects. However, when realistic photographs of a human body are sequentially presented at slow temporal rates, observers report paths of apparent motion that are consistent with the movement limitations of the human body even when those paths ...

People are very sensitive to physical events occurring around them... We know that one solid object cannot merge into another; We make decisions about the properties of objects based on the way in which they interact with each other; We judge whether objects are animate or inanimate depending on whether we perceive them as moving of their own volition, or being "caused" to move by another objec...

BACKGROUND The aim of the present study was to examine to what extent the verbal definitions of familiar objects produced by blind children reflect their peculiar perceptual experience and, in consequence, differ from those produced by sighted children. METHODS Ninety-six visually impaired children, aged between 6 and 14 years, and 32 age-matched sighted children had to define 10 words denoti...

The modern era of study of the representation of object concepts in the human brain began in 1983 with a report by Warrington and McCarthy of a patient with preserved knowledge for animals, foods, and flowers, relative to inanimate objects (Warrington & McCarthy, 1983). This was followed the next year by a report of four patients with the opposite pattern of preserved and impaired category know...

Primates are highly attuned not just to social characteristics of individual agents, but also to social interactions between multiple agents. Here we report a neural correlate of the representation of social interactions in the human brain. Specifically, we observe a strong univariate response in the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) to stimuli depicting social interactions between two ...