A computational deep learning investigation of animacy perception in the human brain

The functional organization of the human object vision pathway distinguishes between animate and inanimate objects. To understand animacy perception, we explore the case of zoomorphic objects resembling animals. While the perception of these objects as animal-like seems obvious to humans, such "Animal bias" is a striking discrepancy between the human brain and deep neural networks (DNNs). We computationally investigated the potential origins of this bias. We successfully induced this bias in DNNs trained explicitly with zoomorphic objects. Alternative training schedules failed to cause an Animal bias. We considered the superordinate distinction between animate and inanimate classes, the sensitivity for faces and bodies, the bias for shape over texture, the role of ecologically valid categories, recurrent connections, and language-informed visual processing. These findings provide computational support that the Animal bias for zoomorphic objects is a unique property of human perception yet can be explained by human learning history.