Discriminating Animate from Inanimate Visual Stimuli

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 multi-agent architecture that performs this classification as well as detailed comparisons of the individual agent contributions against human baselines.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2000
Accession Number
ADA434714

Entities

People

  • Brian Scassellati

Organizations

  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Detection
  • Detectors
  • Energy
  • False Alarms
  • Hypotheses
  • Intelligent Systems
  • Judgment
  • Multiple Hypothesis Tracking
  • Multiple Targets
  • Perception
  • Potential Energy
  • Psychology
  • Robots
  • Trajectories
  • Video

Fields of Study

  • Biology

Readers

  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development
  • Theoretical Analysis.
  • Vision Science/Vision Psychology/Cognitive Neuroscience.