---
title: "Discriminating Animate from Inanimate Visual Stimuli"
authors:
  - "Brian Scassellati"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2001/185"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2001/0185.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2001
pages: "1405-1409"
track: ""
keywords:
---

# Discriminating Animate from Inanimate Visual Stimuli

Brian Scassellati

*Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1405-1409.

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