Then, we used these stimuli to test effects of perceived animacy on visual memory and visual attention. If the anagrams produce stable effects, then we can be confident that animacy itself (and not its lower-level correlates) guides these visual processes.
@talboger.bsky.social’s poster-coaster experience lands in Baltimore this afternoon! Come see him present his work at the @socphilpsych.bsky.social at this evening’s poster session, then grab a coaster as a souvenir. Available while supplies last!
*(An open question is whether some high-level property other than animacy — e.g., natural vs manmade — might explain our results. Our experiments don’t rule out that possibility; but even then it would be a high-level property driving performance, which is the main motivation for our project.)
Come find me at SPP (at my poster on June 18) to hear more, or even just to grab a coaster!
Demo page here: www.perceptionresearch.org/anagrams_ani...
But when we rotate the anagrams to vary their animacy, we also vary their orientation. Might that explain our results? We conducted the present/absent task again, but with silhouetted versions of the anagrams. The effects disappeared here — so orientation alone seems not to explain this effect.
First, we asked whether changes in animacy are encoded in visual working memory. People did a simple retention + change detection task. Changes that altered animacy (e.g., rabbit→boot) were more detectable than changes that did not (e.g., rabbit→dog), even though animacy was task-irrelevant.
Together, this work provides evidence for visual processing of animacy itself*, beyond lower-level correlates like shape or curvature. This adds to the growing use and appeal of “visual anagrams” as a tool for high-level perception (see: bsky.app/profile/talb...).
We also replicated this result with a more typical present/absent search task. As before, participants were faster to determine that a target was present when it differed from distractors in its animacy. Thus, this suggests genuine sensitivity to animacy in visual search!
Next up: visual search. We tested this in several ways because of the many paradigms and results in the literature. We found that, in a location-search task, people were faster at locating targets when they differed from distractors in their animacy (e.g. animate target among inanimate distractors).
Using this technique, we generated images that differ in animacy subject to orientation. So, they hold nearly all lower-level features constant across the two interpretations — because they’re all the same pixels, just rotated!