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Studies using retrospective memory tasks have revealed that animates/living beings are better remembered than are inanimates/nonliving things (the animacy effect). However, considering that memory is foremost future oriented, we hypothesized that the animacy effect would also occur in prospective memory (i.e., memory for future intentions). Using standard prospective memory (PM) procedures, we explored this hypothesis by manipulating the animacy status of the PM targets. Study 1a reports data collected from an American sample; these results were then replicated with a Portuguese sample (Study 1b). Study 2 employed a new procedure, and data were collected from a broader English-speaking sample. In these three studies, animate (vs. inanimate) targets consistently led to a better PM performance, revealing, for the first time, that the animacy advantage extends to PM. These results strengthen the adaptive approach to memory and stress the need to consider animacy as an important variable in memory studies.

Digital assistant is a recent advancement benefited through data-driven innovation. Though digital assistants have become an integral member of user conversations, but there is no theory that relates user perception towards this AI powered technology. The purpose of the research is to investigate the role of technology attitude and AI attributes in enhancing purchase intention through digital assistants. A conceptual model is proposed after identifying three major AI factors namely, perceived anthropomorphism, perceived intelligence, and perceived animacy. To test the model, the study employed structural equation modeling using 440 sample. The results indicated that perceived anthropomorphism plays the most significant role in building a positive attitude and purchase intention through digital assistants. Though the study is built using technology-related variables, the hypotheses are proposed based on various psychology-related theories such as uncanny valley theory, the theory of mind, developmental psychology, and cognitive psychology theory. The study’s theoretical contributions are discussed within the scope of these theories. Besides the theoretical contribution, the study also offers illuminating practical implications for developers and marketers’ benefit.

Human cognition is sensitive to the distinction between living and nonliving things. Animacy plays a role in language comprehension, reasoning, the organization of knowledge, and perception. Although ignored until recently, animacy significantly influences basic memory processes as well. Recent research has indicated that people remember animate targets better than matched inanimate targets; in fact, an item’s animacy status is one of the best predictors of its later recall. Animate processing of inanimate stimuli can produce retention advantages, as can animate touching—inanimate objects are remembered better when they are simply touched by animate things. We discuss these recent findings and their implications for the evolution of cognition, the methodology of memory experiments, and educational practice.

This paper shows that differential object marking (DOM) is not a unitary cross-linguistic phenomenon, and observes that its two subtypes, differential object flagging (DOF) and differential object indexing (DOI), probably have rather different explanations. The cross-linguistic patterns found with both subtypes of DOM can be described by the scales of referential prominence (animacy, specificity, and so on), but DOI is like differential subject indexing (DSI) in that it conforms to the prominent indexing universal, while differential subject flagging (DSF) shows the mirror-image pattern of DOF: Flagging is preferred when the subject is not prominent on one of the prominence scales. The paper provides examples from a wide variety of languages showing that indexing behaves rather differently from flagging. Thus, DOM is not a unified phenomenon, as was already noted by Siewierska (2004) and some earlier authors.

How do people make sense of the emotions, sensations, and cognitive abilities that make up mental life? Pioneering work on the dimensions of mind perception has been interpreted as evidence that people consider mental life to have two core components—experience (e.g., hunger, joy) and agency (e.g., planning, self-control) [Gray HM, et al. (2007) Science 315:619]. We argue that this conclusion is premature: The experience–agency framework may capture people’s understanding of the differences among different beings (e.g., dogs, humans, robots, God) but not how people parse mental life itself. Inspired by Gray et al.’s bottom-up approach, we conducted four large-scale studies designed to assess people’s conceptions of mental life more directly. This led to the discovery of an organization that differs strikingly from the experience–agency framework: Instead of a broad distinction between experience and agency, our studies consistently revealed three fundamental components of mental life—suites of capacities related to the body, the heart, and the mind—with each component encompassing related aspects of both experience and agency. This body–heart–mind framework distinguishes itself from Gray et al.’s experience–agency framework by its clear and importantly different implications for dehumanization, moral reasoning, and other important social phenomena.

This paper concerns the active/passive voice alternation in Kazym Khanty. According to the existing literature, the use of passive in Khanty is conditioned by information structure. Kazym dialect data, however, suggest that there are other parameters such as givenness and animacy that affect the choice of voice. Thus, the aim of this study was to explore the relevant parameters and highlight the ways they interact. The study reveals that in all-new contexts with no established topic speakers choose the voice construction based on animacy, while givenness and topi­cality play a decisive role on later stages of the discourse.

Experimenters often ask subjects to rate displays in terms of high-level visual properties, such as animacy. When do such studies measure subjects’ visual impressions, and when do they merely reflect their judgments that certain features should indicate animacy? Here we introduce the ‘Blindfold Test’ for helping to evaluate the evidence for whether an effect reflects perception or judgment. If the same effect can be obtained not only with visual displays but also by simply describing those displays, then subjects’ responses may reflect higher-level reasoning rather than visual processing—and so other evidence is needed in order to support a ‘perceptual’ interpretation. We applied the Blindfold Test to three past studies in which observers made subjective reports about what they were seeing. In the first two examples, subjects rated stimuli in terms of high-level properties: animacy and physical forces. In both cases, the key findings replicated even when the visual stimuli were replaced with (mere) descriptions, and we conclude that these studies cannot by themselves license conclusions about perception. In contrast, a third example (involving motion-induced blindness) passed the test: subjects produced very different responses when given descriptions of the displays, compared to the visual stimuli themselves—providing compelling evidence that the original responses did not merely reflect such higher-level reasoning. The Blindfold Test may thus help to constrain interpretations of the mental processes underlying certain experimental results—especially for studies of properties that can be apprehended by both seeing and thinking.

People recall and recognize animate words better than inanimate words, perhaps because memory systems were shaped by evolution to prioritize memory for predators, people, and food sources. Attentional paradigms show an animacy advantage that suggests that the animacy advantage in memory stems from a prioritization of animate items when allocating attentional resources during encoding. According to the attentional prioritization hypothesis, the animacy effect should be even larger when attention is divided during encoding. Alternatively, the animacy effect could be due to more controlled processing during encoding, and so should be reduced when attention is divided during encoding. We tested the attentional prioritization hypothesis and the controlled processing hypothesis by manipulating attention during encoding in free recall ( Experiment 1 ) and recognition ( Experiment 2 ) but failed to find interactions between word type and attentional load in either free recall or recognition, contrary to the predictions from both hypotheses. We then tested whether the semantic representations of animate and inanimate items differ in terms of number of semantic features, using existing recall data from an item-level megastudy by Lau, Goh, and Yap ( Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology , 71 (10), 2207–2222, 2018 ). Animate items have more semantic features, which partially mediated the relationship between animacy status and recall.

Maintenance of home appliances can be tedious. Maintenance work can be physically demanding and it is not always easy to know the cause of a malfunctioning appliance. Many users need to motivate themselves to perform maintenance work and consider it ideal for home appliances to be maintenance-free. On the other hand, pets and other living creatures can be taken care of with joy and without much pain, even if they are difficult to take care of. To alleviate the hassle associated with the maintenance of home appliances, we propose an augmented reality (AR) system to superimpose an agent over the home appliance of concern who changes their behavior according to the internal state of the appliance. Taking a refrigerator as an example, we verify whether such AR agent visualization motivates users to perform maintenance work and reduces the associated discomfort. We designed a cartoon-like agent and implemented a prototype system using a HoloLens 2, which can switch between several animations depending on the internal state of the refrigerator. Using the prototype system, a Wizard of Oz user study comparing three conditions was conducted. We compared the proposed method (Animacy condition), an additional behavior method (Intelligence condition), and a text-based method as a baseline for presenting the refrigerator state. In the Intelligence condition, the agent looked at the participants from time to time as if it was aware of them and exhibited help-seeking behavior only when it was considered that they could take a short break. The results show that both the Animacy and Intelligence conditions induced animacy perception and a sense of intimacy. It was also evident that the agent visualization made the participants feel more pleasant. On the other hand, the sense of discomfort was not reduced by the agent visualization and the Intelligence condition did not improve the perceived intelligence or the sense of coercion further compared to the Animacy condition.

Imagine a pack of predators stalking their prey. The predators may not always move directly toward their target (e.g., when circling around it), but they may be consistently facing toward it. The human visual system appears to be extremely sensitive to such situations, even in displays involving simple shapes. We demonstrate this by introducing the wolfpack effect, which is found when several randomly moving, oriented shapes (darts, or discs with \"eyes\") consistently point toward a moving disc. Despite the randomness of the shapes' movement, they seem to interact with the disc—as if they are collectively pursuing it. This impairs performance in interactive tasks (including detection of actual pursuit), and observers selectively avoid such shapes when moving a disc through the display themselves. These and other results reveal that the wolfpack effect is a novel \"social\" cue to perceived animacy. And, whereas previous work has focused on the causes of perceived animacy, these results demonstrate its effects, showing how it irresistibly and implicitly shapes visual performance and interactive behavior.