May the force be against you: Better visual sensitivity to speed changes opposite to gravity

Beyond seemingly lower-level features such as color and motion, visual perception also recovers properties more commonly associated with higher-level thought, as when an upwardly accelerating object is seen not just as moving, but moreover as self-propelled, and resisting the force of gravity. Given past research demonstrating the prioritization of living things in attention and memory, here we hypothesized that observers would be more sensitive to an object's speed changes if those speed changes were opposite to natural gravitational acceleration. Across six experiments, we found that observers were more sensitive to objects' accelerations when they moved upward (when those accelerations were opposite to gravity) and less sensitive to their accelerations when they moved downward (when those accelerations were consistent with gravity). Moreover, observers were more sensitive to objects' decelerations when they moved downward (when those decelerations appeared as "braking" against gravity), and less sensitive to their decelerations when they moved upward (when those decelerations were consistent with gravity). This greater visual sensitivity to speed changes opposite to gravity is consistent with previous results suggesting that we readily monitor the world for cues to animacy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).