Across humans' evolutionary history, detecting animate entities in the visual field (such as prey and predators) has been critical for survival. One of the defining features of animals is their motion-self-propelled and self-directed. Does such animate motion capture visual attention? To answer this question, we compared the time to detect targets involving objects that were moving predictably ...

The mechanism by which humans perceive others differs greatly from how humans perceive inanimate objects. Unlike inanimate objects, humans have the distinct property of being "like me" in the eyes of the observer. This allows us to use the same systems that process knowledge about self-performed actions, self-conceived thoughts, and self-experienced emotions to understand actions, thoughts, and...

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 upo...

We investigate whether semantic information related to object categories can be obtained from human fMRI BOLD responses with Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). While the BOLD response provides only an indirect measure of neural activity on a relatively coarse spatiotemporal scale, it has the advantage that it can be recorded from humans, who can be questioned about their perceptions during the expe...

Radical environmental groups engaged in ecotage—or economic sabotage of inanimate objects thought to be complicit in environmental destruction—have been identified as the leading domestic terrorist threat in the post-9/11 “war on terror.” This article examines the case for extending the conventional definition of terrorism to include attacks not only against noncombatants, but also against inan...