Dataset: Identifying critical kinematic features of animate motion and contribution to animacy perception

Humans can distinguish flying birds from drones based solely on motion features when no image information is available. However, it remains unclear which motion features of animate motion induce our animacy perception. To address this, we first analyzed the differences in centroid motion between birds and drones, and discovered that birds exhibit greater acceleration, angular speed, and trajectory fluctuations. We further determined the order of their importance in evoking animacy perception was trajectory fluctuations, acceleration and speed. More interestingly, people judge whether a moving object is alive using a feature-matching strategy, implying that animacy perception is induced in a key feature-triggered way rather than relying on the accumulation of evidence. Our findings not only shed light on the critical motion features that induce animacy perception and their relative contributions, but also have important implications for developing target classification algorithms based on motion features.

在无图像信息可供参考的情况下，人类仅依靠运动特征即可区分飞行中的鸟类与无人机。然而，目前仍不清楚哪些生物运动（animate motion）特征能够诱发人类的生命性感知（animacy perception）。为解答这一问题，我们首先分析了鸟类与无人机的质心运动（centroid motion）差异，发现鸟类的加速度、角速度与轨迹波动幅度均更大。我们进一步明确了三者在唤起生命性感知时的重要性排序为：轨迹波动、加速度、角速度。更值得关注的是，人类在判断运动物体是否具有生命时采用了特征匹配策略，这表明生命性感知是通过关键特征触发的方式产生的，而非依赖证据的累积。本研究不仅阐明了诱发生命性感知的关键运动特征及其相对贡献程度，同时对于开发基于运动特征的目标分类算法具有重要的借鉴意义与应用价值。