The influence of movement on perceptions of aliveness: a replication and extension of Goldberg & Thompson-Schill (2009)

Children often mistake things that appear to move without visible external intervention, such as clouds, for being alive. Interestingly, these mistakes are still made by adults under time pressure. Goldberg and Thompson-Schill (2009) demonstrated this using a rapid classification task, and showed that adults make more errors when judging if plants and moving natural things are alive (compared to animals, and still or artificial things). Over four experiments, we explored Goldberg and Thompson-Schill’s (2009) proposal that connections formed in childhood between movement and aliveness are used in adulthood to make decisions about aliveness. Our findings replicated Goldberg and Thompson-Schill’s (2009) results, that plants and moving natural things were more difficult to classify by aliveness. In addition, we showed that plants and natural things used in their study were also less familiar and harder to visualise than other categories. Interestingly, participants intuitively believed that moving natural things can move without external intervention, suggesting that associations between movement and aliveness influence decisions made without time pressure. These results suggest that movement is an important part of our conceptual understanding of aliveness, and how we encode objects in our environment.