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This chapter examines a set of related concepts, including judgments of animacy, judgments of agency or intentionality, and anthropomorphizing, focusing on the functional neuroanatomy of each process. Anthropomorphizing can be viewed as an illusion: stimuli possessing certain features appear to automatically elicit attributions of mental states and other qualities associated with people, in the face of declarative knowledge that the stimuli are not only not human but, in many cases, inanimate. Studies of illusions are particularly useful in revealing the organization of perceptual processes. The chapter considers studies of anthropomorphizing — that is, the attribution of personhood and person-related features such as emotions, intentions, personality traits, and beliefs to inanimate objects. It gives particular attention to the neural circuitry underlying social attributions based on the kind of minimal stimuli described above, relating these findings to other social processes in which the same neural regions have been implicated. Finally, it proposes a framework relating judgments of animacy, agency or goal, and emotion.

Alternations between ‘transitive’ and ‘intransitive’ verbs in Blackfoot signal neither an aspectual shift nor the addition or suppression of internal arguments. Rather, ‘transitive’ morphology formally licenses DP objects; ‘intransitive’ morphology allows NP, CP, or no object. The relevant morphology, which constitutes v, also determines animacy and theta‐role of the external argument.

This chapter presents the ideas of agency, intentionality, and teleo-functional reasoning. Agency is something we infer from the regular patterns we observe in an entity’s behavior. Such patterns trigger assumptions about animacy (liveliness, self-propelledness) and may also lead to attribution mentality (beliefs and desires) to the behaving entity. Agency is something that is inferred; therefore it is immaterial and detached from a bodily implementation. Observing regular patterns also in purely natural events may trigger assumptions about invisible agents responsible for this apparent order. Such proclivity to “promiscuous teleology” makes concepts of supernatural agents salient and easy to adopt. Supernatural agents are also believed to have open access to all minds and thus to know everybody’s thoughts. Such omniscience is explained by combining Tylor’s idea of religion as belief in spirits with Durkheim’s idea of religion as the social “glue” that ties a group of people together.

Focusing on human intuitions about agency and intentionality helps understand beliefs about spirits, gods, and buddhas. Supernatural agents are beings with animacy and mentality, combined with a nonstandard bodily form. In transcending individual corporeal boundaries, supernatural agents represent the shared knowledge of a group (my beliefs about your beliefs about our beliefs …) Durkheim’s view of religion as the “social glue” thus is possibly only because of spirit beliefs. Reflective ideas about gods and buddhas are highly elaborated spirit beliefs. They are culture-specific versions of the cross-culturally recurrent pattern of a “promiscuous teleology,” the tendency to see everything as happening for a purpose. This phenomenon is based on hyperactive agency detection (HAD), hyperactive understanding of intentionality (HUI), and hyperactive teleological reasoning (HTR). Supernatural agent concepts are contagious because they resonate with an innate tendency to understand more or less everything in teleological terms.

The chapter applies the scientific approach to the question of how human beings recognize and execute small spatial stories which organize and add meaning to an otherwise chaotic jumble of human experiences. The skeletal framework of these stories is called the image schema, which recurs in a person's sensory and motor experience. These schemas originate from the acts of perception and interaction and can be combined to form complex groups. Paralleling the parable, image schemas are also projected through links and paths that assure alignment and preclude conflict. The recognition of spatial stories also necessitates the recognition of the sequence of the related situations which are structured by image schemas. The appropriate human action is then produced through the execution, recognition, imagination, prediction, evaluation, planning, and explanation of these image schemas. The difference between animacy and agency is then discussed, followed by additional research on image schemas.

This chapter reviews evidence from numerous studies of inversion effects and preattentive processing that converge in suggesting that the visual system exploits its sensitivity to gravity-defined dynamics to detect the ballistic movements typical of limbed terrestrial animals in locomotion. It is proposed that a local visual filter may be sufficient to detect the gravity-defined dynamics of the most important types of animate motion. This local motion processing mechanism is thought to reflect both innate and learned component processes.

Newborn infants have a special affinity for motion. It is not surprising, therefore, that the perception of biological motion has an important role in the early development of infants. This chapter describes the development of biological motion perception across early development. The chapter provides a critical discussion about whether “limitations” in infants’ visual system may reflect attunements that adaptively orient infants toward significant others (e.g., caregivers), describes the visual behavior of infants as evidence that they are actively selecting agents as targets of their attention, and provides a review of the overlaps between adult and infant vision research.

This chapter reviews neuroimaging evidence that reveals several unique brain states associated with the recognition of agents engaged in biological motion. A key brain area, the human superior temporal sulcus (STS), is most strongly driven by dynamic, articulating human bodies. The STS also supports the perception of animacy, social interactions, and multimodal cues to human actions.

This chapter establishes that not all languages have a grammaticized mass/count distinction and consequently we have to distinguish between ontological properties associated with nouns and categorical properties associated with a functional category dominating these nouns. It is argued that the categorical properties associated with the mass/count distinction are tied to a functional category identified as nominal inner aspect. This category can host the feature responsible for the mass/count distinction (i.e, [± bounded]). It is further shown that languages lacking a categorical mass/count distinction come in at least two varieties. They can lack the functional category which may host the [±bounded] feature (Halkomelem). Alternatively, they can associated a different feature with inner aspect. In particular, it is shown that in Blackfoot [±animate] associates with inner aspect. Consequently, in this language, it is animacy, rather than mass/count which serves as the nominal classification device.

The focus of this book is on the detection and interpretation of intentional social entities. While Fritz Heider is often considered one of the major influences on social psychology his emphasis on the perception of intentional action may have had even greater influence within the field of developmental psychology. Heider was interested in causal attribution, and schooled in the non-social causal attribution that was of interest in his time. He made a novel advance by bringing the logic of causal attribution into the social domain. The present volume has an empirical emphasis on vision science, developmental science, and neuroscience owing to a recent upswing in research in these areas coupled with technological advances. Theoretical frameworks and methodological paradigms that cut across these areas are: Developmental Science, Evolutionary Psychology, Neurocience, and Clinical Approaches. The goal was a collection of chapters that told a coherent story about three aspects of social perception: the perception of biological motion, the perception of animacy, and the attributions of intentionality.

Adults are able to easily extract motion information from even very simple stimuli in order to perceive animate motion and infer agency. This ability develops early in infancy, is a human universal, and is irresistible when certain motion cues are presented. Theorists have been intrigued by the idea that underlying this perception is specialized cognitive machinery designed for just this purpose, though there is not broad consensus that this is the case. Here I argue in favor of the idea that only the existence of specialized social perceptual psychology explains the performance of typical and autistic observers. Accounts based on processing by general-learning mechanisms cannot account for findings in this area.

Typically, the actions of agents in classical animacy displays are synthetically created, thus forming artificial displays of biological movement. Therefore, the link between the motion in animacy displays and that of actual biological motion is unclear. In this chapter we will look at work being done to clarify this relationship. We will first discuss a modern approach to the creation of animacy displays whereby full-video displays of human interactions are reduced into simple animacy displays; this results in animate shapes whose motions are directly derived from human actions. Second, we will review what is known about the ability of typically developed adults and people with autism spectrum disorders to perceive the intentionality within these displays. Finally, we will explore the effects that motion parameters such as speed and acceleration, measured directly from original human actions, have on the perception of intent; fMRI studies that connect neural networks to motion parameters, and the resultant perception of animacy and intention, will also be examined.

Often, mental development is viewed as resulting either from domain-general learning mechanisms or from highly specialized modules containing substantial innate knowledge. However, an evolutionary developmental perspective suggests that learning and specialization are not necessarily in opposition. Instead, natural selection can favor learning mechanisms that rely on information from the environment to construct adaptive phenotypes, exploiting recurrent properties of fitness-relevant domains. Here we consider the possibility that early action understanding is centered on domain-specific action schemas that guide attention towards domain-relevant events and motivate learning about those domains. We examine chasing as a case study. We report studies (1) exploring the mechanisms that guide infants’ attention to chasing events and (2) examining the inferences and judgments that children and adults make. We argue that these findings are consistent with the possibility that natural selection has built “islands of competence” in early action understanding that serve as kernels for future learning and development.

We can identify social agents in our environment not only on the basis of how they look, but also on the basis of how they move—and even simple geometric shapes can give rise to rich percepts of animacy and intentionality based on their motion patterns. But why should we think that such phenomena truly reflect visual processing, as opposed to higher-level judgment and categorization based on visual input? This chapter explores five lines of evidence: (1) The phenomenology of visual experience, (2) dramatic dependence on subtle visual display details, (3) implicit influences on visual performance, (4) activation of visual brain areas, and (5) interactions with other visual processes. Collectively, this evidence provides compelling support for the idea that visual processing itself traffics in animacy and intentionality.

Chapter 5 offers a careful analysis of the data from the entries of the Middle English Dictionary according to the five factors which were identified in Chapter 2 as possibly having influenced the presence or absence of impersonal usage with verbs of emotion, namely constructional patterns (intransitive, transitive, passive, reflexive), animacy of the Target of Emotion, argument alternation (especially conative alternation), causation, and aspect (stative or eventive). Not only the verbs in the seven ‘Emotion’ categories in the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary with impersonal usage but also the verbs in three of the categories without it (Jealousy/envy, Pride, Courage) are examined in detail. All the five factors turn out to have an effect on the boundaries between impersonal and near-synonymous non-impersonal verbs. The chapter also points to several impersonal verbs which have not been recognized in the literature.

The final chapter first revisits the issue of transitivity of impersonal verbs and concludes that Middle English verbs of emotion are likely to occur in impersonal constructions if they are causative, have low transitivity, tend to choose inanimate Targets of Emotions, and can express episodic mental states, whereas non-impersonal usage may be ascribed to the lack of causation, having high transitivity, preference for animate Targets of Emotions, or tendency to express a long-term feeling. These parameters all become less rigid from around the fourteenth century, leading several verbs which do not necessarily meet this generalization to appear in impersonal constructions as nonce expressions. The chapter reveals further correlations with how emotions are defined and classified in psychology. Suggestions for future research are also offered.

Prehispanic ontologies can be conceptualized as historically situated meshworks that unfold particular engagements among humans, other-than-humans, places and substances. The affective and animacy capacities of the participant of these fields of relations are connected to their historical position within them. Through comparing the visual, technical, and spatial attributes of rock art production during 3,500 years in Valle El Encanto (Chile), we describe how the manufacture of rock paintings and petroglyphs unfolded different fields of relations. Based on the above, this chapter discusses how these particular meshworks were related to specific historical landscapes and two different ontologies: one related to hunter-gatherer groups and another to Andean-agrarian communities. The transformation identified in Valle El Encanto allows us to discuss the historical replacement of ontologies, as well as how social practices and the affective and animacy capacities of other-than-humans, places and substances changed their relative position within the fields of relation throughout history.

Previous theories have tended to focus on a single mechanism to explain the development of knowledge of animates and inanimates infancy, although for some theorists this mechanism is domain-specific and for others it is domain-general. In contrast to these well-documented positions, in this chapter the authors claim that infants’ understanding of animacy reflects many developmental changes that occur at many levels, reflect many mechanisms—some that are domain-specific and some that are domain-general—and reflect structural, environmental, and learned constraints on that development. Examples of such developmental cascades are provided with a focus on infants’ developing knowledge of goal-directed action.