Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access published online on May 21, 2007
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, doi:10.1093/scan/nsm017
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Anthropomorphism influences perception of computer-animated characters’ actions
1Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute, Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, Keihanna Science City, Kyoto, 619-0288, Japan, 2School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890, USA and 3ICORP Computational Brain Project, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Keihanna Science City, Kyoto, 619-0288, Japan
Computer-animated characters are common in popular culture and have begun to be used as experimental tools in social cognitive neurosciences. Here we investigated how appearance of these characters’ influences perception of their actions. Subjects were presented with different characters animated either with motion data captured from human actors or by interpolating between poses (keyframes) designed by an animator, and were asked to categorize the motion as biological or artificial. The response bias towards ‘biological’, derived from the Signal Detection Theory, decreases with characters’ anthropomorphism, while sensitivity is only affected by the simplest rendering style, point-light displays. fMRI showed that the response bias correlates positively with activity in the mentalizing network including left temporoparietal junction and anterior cingulate cortex, and negatively with regions sustaining motor resonance. The absence of significant effect of the characters on the brain activity suggests individual differences in the neural responses to unfamiliar artificial agents. While computer-animated characters are invaluable tools to investigate the neural bases of social cognition, further research is required to better understand how factors such as anthropomorphism affect their perception, in order to optimize their appearance for entertainment, research or therapeutic purposes.
Keywords: anthropomorphism; computer-animated characters; biological motion
Correspondence should be addressed to Thierry Chaminade, Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuromaging, 12 Queen Square, London, UK, WC1N 3BG. E-mail: tchamina{at}gmail.com
T.C. was supported by a Japan Trust grant. We thank Moshe Mahler for recording the motion capture data and creating the animated models, and insightful comments from Chris Frith on earlier versions of this manuscript. Carnegie Mellon University would like to thank Autodesk for the donation of licenses for their Maya software. J.K.H. was supported in part by NSF Grant IIS-0326322.
Received September 25, 2006. Accepted April 16, 2007.