Animacy perception from motion cues: Cognitive and neural mechanisms

: Perceiving animacy from moving entities is vital to human survival, reproduction, and social interaction. Motion cues that trigger animacy perception can be divided into two types: movements with biological motion patterns and movements conveying intention, both of which contain some specific motion features that are key to animacy perception. The existing theoretical hypotheses explain the above phenomena from the perspectives of visual information processing and social cognition, respectively. Animacy perception from the two types of motion cues engages multiple cortical and sub-cortical brain regions, which may constitute a brain network serving the purpose of life-signal detection as well as high-level functions like intention understanding and reasoning. Future studies need to systematically reveal the distinct roles of the two types of motion cues in animacy perception and their interactive mechanisms from cognitive, behavioral genetic, and neural aspects. Meanwhile, the organization and connection of the brain network for animacy perception and the exact function of each individual node in this network remain to be illuminated. In addition, exploring the computational principle of animacy perception from motion cues and treating the deficits in such ability as a potential marker of social cognitive disorders would help promote its application in the fields of artificial intelligence and mental disorder diagnosis.