Does the preschooler's use of the animate-inanimate distinction reflect knowledge about which category types engage in self-initiated movements? Threeand 4-year-olds viewed photographs of unfamiliar objects, including mammalian animals, nonmammalian animals, statues with animallike forms and parts, wheeled vehicles, and multipart rigid objects, and decided whether each item could go up and down...

Extensive non-maternal childcare plays an important role in children's development. This study examined a potential coping mechanism for dealing with daily separation from caregivers involved in childcare experience - children's development of attachments toward inanimate objects. We employed the twin design to estimate relative environmental and genetic contributions to the presence of object ...

We report an aphasic patient, Z.B.L., who showed a significant advantage for verbs compared to nouns in picture-naming tests. Within the object class, he performed better on animate things than on nonliving things in picture naming as well as in an "attribute judgement task". This pattern of performance is contrary to the central prediction of a recent proposal (Bird, Howard, & Franklin, 2000),...

Human cognition is sensitive to the distinction between living and nonliving things. Animacy plays a role in language comprehension, reasoning, the organization of knowledge, and perception. Although ignored until recently, animacy significantly influences basic memory processes as well. Recent research has indicated that people remember animate targets better than matched inanimate targets; in...

A fundamental debate within cognitive science concerns how infants, children, and adults learn about the motion properties of animates and inanimates. In this paper, we show that an associative-learning mechanism implemented as a neural network can use animacy relations to predict and discriminate between familiar and novel causal and noncausal events. This is possible because (1) animate objec...

Face perception in humans and nonhuman primates is rapid and accurate [1-4]. In the human brain, a network of visual-processing regions is specialized for faces [5-7]. Although face processing is a priority of the primate visual system, face detection is not infallible. Face pareidolia is the compelling illusion of perceiving facial features on inanimate objects, such as the illusory face on th...