Humans have a tendency to perceive inanimate objects as animate based on simple motion cues. Although animacy is considered as a complex cognitive property, this recognition seems to be spontaneous. Researchers have found that young human infants discriminate between dependent and independent movement patterns. However, quick visual perception of animate entities may be crucial to non-human spe...

The subject of this article are the conditions for use Polish masculine inanimate singular nouns in accusative with -a suffix as a systemic morphological characteristic animate nouns. author proposes several ways to explain reasons expansion. Theory wise, study is based on system-functional grammar well natural grammar. emphasis placed description grammatical system perspective speech activity ...

For several languages, a preference for subject relative clauses over object relative clauses has been reported. However, Mak, Vonk, and Schriefers (2002) showed that there is no such preference for relative clauses with an animate subject and an inanimate object. A Dutch object relative clause as . . .de rots, die de wandelaars beklommen hebben. . . (‘the rock, that the hikers climbed’) did no...

Many studies have suggested that emotional stimuli orient and engage attention. There is also evidence that animate stimuli, such as those from humans and animals, cause attentional bias. However, categorical and emotional factors are usually mixed, and it is unclear to what extent human context influences attentional allocation. To address this issue, we tracked participants' eye movements whi...

An ability to distinguish animate things from inanimate things is essential for our social cognition. In this study, we investigated the differences in brain activity between when interacting with an animate thing and when interacting with an artificial thing. We recorded EventRelated Potentials under two conditions; eight participants reached an animate thing (turtle) (animacy condition) and r...

Preparation of this article was supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to the second author. The authors would like to thank Arlene Walker-Andrews, Philippe Rochat, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to David H. Rakison, Department of Psychology, Baker Hall, Carnegie M...