Skip to content
DraconiticResearch
Search Sources API
197,768 studies31 sourcesUpdated 15 min ago
PreprintCC BY 4.0PsyArXiv

Comment on Boger & Firestone (2026): Perceiving animacy in ‘identical’ images

  • Surya Gayet
Open at sourcePDFDOICite

Abstract

Boger and Firestone (2026) use a novel set of hybrid stimuli whose identity changes with rotation. They find that change-detection is easier when such images cross the animate-inanimate boundary, and that targets are found faster among distractors of the opposite animacy, despite these objects being constituted of the same pixel-by-pixel content. These results are taken as evidence that animacy influences visual cognition independently of its lower-level visual correlates. Here, I challenge this inference on two grounds. First, rotation preserves global image statistics but changes the positions and orientations of local features in a retinotopic, anisotropic visual system. Second, findings obtained with a small set of deliberately ambiguous images do not establish the mechanisms of ordinary object recognition. Visual anagrams are ingenious stimuli, but their usefulness for isolating animacy from its visual correlates remains limited.

Related

  1. When tigers are not animals: The neural disappearance of animacy as a function of linguistic structure
    S. M. Krogh, L. Pylkkänen
    bioRxivPreprintCC BY-NC-NDFull textNeurosciencebioRxiv
  2. Reactions to Perceiving Tangible vs Virtual Impossible objects: Investigating Dimensions of Visual Reality
    P. Y. Rossetti, M. Souilhol, A. Foncelle +5
    bioRxivPreprintCC BYFull textNeurosciencebioRxiv
  3. Beyond individual features: Identifying computational principles in perceiving visual beauty
    Mustafa Alperen Ekinci, Philipp Flieger, Daniel Kaiser
    PsyArXivPreprintCC BY 4.0Full textNeuroscienceOSF
  4. Field-Zone-Associated Transcriptomic and Metabolic Divergence Despite Nearly Identical Observed Chlorophyll in an Agrivoltaic Tea Setting
    Ruifang Wang, Shuai Zhang, Zhengwan Xie +3
    GenesPeer-reviewedCC BYFull textGenetics & genomicsEurope PMC
  5. Provenance-aware handling of identical dengue genome records alters inferred envelope-protein variation in Bangladesh DENV-3
    K. T. Begum, K. A. G. Rafea
    bioRxivPreprintCC BYFull textBioinformatics & computational biologybioRxiv

Cite

BibTeXRIS
BibTeX
@misc{gayet2026comment,
  title = {{Comment on Boger & Firestone (2026): Perceiving animacy in ‘identical’ images}},
  author = {Surya Gayet},
  howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  doi = {10.31234/osf.io/c6jgs_v1},
  url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/c6jgs_v1/},
  note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY  - UNPB
TI  - Comment on Boger & Firestone (2026): Perceiving animacy in ‘identical’ images
AU  - Surya Gayet
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/03
PB  - PsyArXiv
DO  - 10.31234/osf.io/c6jgs_v1
UR  - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/c6jgs_v1/
AB  - Boger and Firestone (2026) use a novel set of hybrid stimuli whose identity changes with rotation. They find that change-detection is easier when such images cross the animate-inanimate boundary, and that targets are found faster among distractors of the opposite animacy, despite these objects being constituted of the same pixel-by-pixel content. These results are taken as evidence that animacy influences visual cognition independently of its lower-level visual correlates. Here, I challenge this inference on two grounds. First, rotation preserves global image statistics but changes the positions and orientations of local features in a retinotopic, anisotropic visual system. Second, findings obtained with a small set of deliberately ambiguous images do not establish the mechanisms of ordinary object recognition. Visual anagrams are ingenious stimuli, but their usefulness for isolating animacy from its visual correlates remains limited.
ER  -