Can the language you speak affect the way you think? Unlike English, many languages have a grammatical gender system whereby all nouns are assigned a gender. Does talking about inanimate objects as if they were masculine or feminine actually lead people to think of inanimate objects as having a gender? A series of studies found effects of grammatical gender on people’s perceptions of similarity...

We looked at how far students aged 10–17 years differentiate between the force and energy concepts for animates and inanimates. Within a structured interview format, participants described situations in which inanimate objects and animate agents interacted. Results showed that the younger students made no distinction between the two concepts for the inanimate objects. They regarded force and en...

Winnicott ( 1953) was the first investigator in the Western literature who paid due attention to the rather common phenomenon of a “security” blanket. In his report he introduced the term “transitional object” and described it as the first not-me possession of a child which plays an important role in ego development. Since then, many reports on this topic have appeared, mainly in the psychoanal...

People can rapidly and efficiently categorize the animacy of natural objects. Does this imply that visual system has an unlimited capacity for processing across entire field? To test this, we generated a set morphed “animacy continua” between animate inanimate silhouettes. Observers were shown different ratios these items (2:1, 10:3) judged whether was more animate/inanimate. The distribution e...

This study aims to reveal deeper and different meaning of an inanimate object, specifically umbrella, from naked eye's perspective in The Blue Umbrella Film. Film, animated short film directed by Saschka Unsled, employs objects as the characters seen through distinct human's facial expression painted on black, blue, red umbrellas To pursue aim this study, qualitative method was conducted togeth...

The world around us presents two fundamentally different forms of patterns: those that appear random and those that appear ordered. As adults we appreciate that these two types of patterns tend to arise from very different sorts of causal processes. Typically, we expect that, whereas agents can increase the orderliness of a system, inanimate objects can cause only increased disorder. Thus, one ...

Infants know that humans are exempt from some of the principles that govern the motion of inanimate objects: for instance, humans can be caused to move without being struck. In the current study, we report that infants nevertheless do apply some of the same principles to both humans and objects, where appropriate. Five-month-old infants expect humans, like all material objects, to be solid.

When inanimate objects start moving on their own, humans often attribute life or lifelike qualities to the objects. In this paper we discuss lifelikeness in deformable interfaces and suggest future research to help us understand better when and why lifelikeness is appropriate.