From motion cues to social perception: innate predispositions

Identifying animated subjects is fundamental to survive. Several perceptual cues allow human and non human animals to identify living objects and among them motion cues are the most informative. In this terms, humans’ striking ability to attribute “causal relations” (i.e. appreciation of the interaction between any two events in terms of a cause-effect relationship) and “animacy” (i.e. the capability of an object to have self-propelled motion) to objects on the basis of their pattern of motion is well attested as well as humans’ capability to discriminate the biological vs. non-biological nature of a motion (Johansson, 1976). Up to now, the role of innate predispositions and experience in the origin of the sensitivity for social objects, causal relation and animacy is still a matter of dispute. For these reasons a developmental perspective becomes critical to disentangle the question about the experience dependent or experience independent origin of such sensitivity. In this chapter we will discuss the experimental evidence highlighting innate predispositions at the origin of perception of physical causality, self-propelled motion and biological motion.