Discriminating animate from inanimate visual stimuli

  • Authors:
  • Brian Scassellati

  • Affiliations:
  • MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Cambridge, MA

  • Venue:
  • IJCAI'01 Proceedings of the 17th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

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 upon the spatial and temporal properties of the movement. In this paper, I present both a multiagent architecture that performs this classification as well as detailed comparisons of the individual agent contributions against human baselines.