Cognizing Consciousness

Brian Scholl, OPAM’s keynote speaker this year, gave a particularly fascinating talk yesterday evening. His research over the last few years has been on the threshold for animateness perception. That is, at what point does an object’s movement seem to be intentional?

A subset of this study is the wolfpack series, which explores the above question quite well. In this example (depicted above) dart-shaped objects are oriented at the subject (green disc). Although most people instinctively believe the darts are pursuing the subject, their movements are coded to be completely random. In this example, the darts are exhibiting the same random movement, but are oriented at an angle perpendicular to the subject line-of-sight. Although the movement is the same in both conditions, the intention of the darts seems to change dramatically across conditions. This serves as a great example of top-down perceptive influence.