Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Mark EldridgeORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND).
© Copyright 2021 The Authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Downloaded from jov.arvojournals.org on 04/03/2021 Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. The current experiment investigated the extent to which perceptual categorization of animacy (i.e., the ability to discriminate animate and inanimate objects) is facilitated by image-based features that distinguish the two object categories. We show that, with nominal training, naïve macaques could classify a trial-unique set of 1000 novel images with high accuracy. To test whether image-based features that naturally differ between animate and inanimate objects, such as curvilinear and rectilinear information, contribute to the monkeys’ accuracy, we created synthetic images using an algorithm that distorted the global shape of the original animate/inanimate images while maintaining their intermediate features (Portilla & Simoncelli, 2000). Performance on the synthesized images was significantly above chance and was predicted by the amount of curvilinear information in the images. Our results demonstrate that, without training, macaques can use an intermediate image feature, curvilinearity, to facilitate their categorization of animate and inanimate objects.
Author(s): Yetter M, Robert S, Mammarella G, Richmond B, Eldridge MAG, Ungerleider LG, Yue X
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Journal of Vision
Year: 2021
Volume: 21
Issue: 4
Pages: 1-16
Online publication date: 02/04/2021
Acceptance date: 02/04/2018
Date deposited: 19/02/2025
ISSN (electronic): 1534-7362
Publisher: Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology Inc.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.21.4.3
DOI: 10.1167/jov.21.4.3
PubMed id: 33798259
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
