Perceiving animacy in ‘identical’ images

Some objects appear ‘animate’ (e.g. dogs and elephants) while others do not (e.g. boots and sofas). This distinction pervades human cognition, with an expansive literature reporting striking effects of animacy on vision, memory, social perception, and neural organization. But studies of perceived animacy face a persistent challenge: Objects that differ in animacy tend to differ in many lower-level…