Perceiving animacy in 'identical' images.

The visual system uniquely encodes animacy independently of lower-level visual features, as shown by eight experiments using 'visual anagrams' to control for confounds.

• Why it matters: Understanding whether animacy influences perception directly or through associated visual features is crucial for clarifying how humans process animate versus inanimate objects in complex environments.
• What they did: Researchers generated static images with identical low-level features but differing in perceived animacy by manipulating orientation through a diffusion-based 'visual anagrams' technique, conducting eight pre-registered experiments.
• The result: Findings reveal that the brain's representation of animacy affects visual working memory and attention, demonstrating that animacy itself, not just visual features, guides perceptual processing.