Stories in the Mind? The Role of Story-Based Categorizations in Motion Classification

Categorization is fundamental for spatial and motion representation in both the domain of artificial intelligence and human cognition. In this paper, we investigated whether motion categorizations designed in artificial intelligence can inform human cognition. More concretely, we investigated if such categorizations (also known as qualitative representations) can inform the psychological understanding of human perception and memory of motion scenes. To this end, we took two motion categorizations in artificial intelligence, Motion-RCC and Motion-OPRA₁ , and conducted four experiments on human perception and memory. Participants viewed simple motion scenes and judged the similarity of transformed scenes with this reference scene. Those transformed scenes differed in none, one, or both Motion-RCC and Motion-OPRA₁ categories. Importantly, we applied an equal absolute metric change to those transformed scenes, so that differences in the similarity judgments should be due only to differing categories. In Experiments 1a and 1b, where the reference stimulus and transformed stimuli were visible at the same time (perception), both Motion-OPRA₁ and Motion-RCC influenced the similarity judgments, with a stronger influence of Motion-OPRA₁ . In Experiments 2a and 2b, where participants first memorized the reference stimulus and viewed the transformed stimuli after a short blank (memory), only Motion-OPRA₁ had marked influences on the similarity judgments. Our findings demonstrate a link between human cognition and these motion categorizations developed in artificial intelligence. We argue for a continued and close multidisciplinary approach to investigating the representation of motion scenes.