An experimental study of apparent behavior

By F. Heider, M. Simmel. 1944

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

Citations in the corpus

Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences (2017, methodology): “Figure 5: A screenshot of the video used in Heider and Simmel’s seminal study [67].”
Learning to Relate Images (2011, background): “ relations may 1The importance of image correspondence in action understanding is nicely illustrated in Heider and Simmel’s 1944 video of geometric objects engaged in various \social activities" [15] (althouth the 1 arXiv:1110.0107v2 [cs.CV] 5 Apr 2012 have to be kept in mind when trying to bui”
Mind-making practices: the social infrastructure of self-knowing agency and responsibility (2015, background): “A particularly vivid illustration of this is found in Heider and Simmel’s now classic study of the reaction of typical viewers to an animated film of simple geometric figures (two triangles and a circle) moving in and around a rectangular enclosure (Heider and Simmel 1944).”
Machine Learning Interpretability: A Survey on Methods and Metrics (2019, background): “A few decades ago, Heider and Simmel [97] have shown that people attribute beliefs and intentions to abstract objects.”
One-year-old infants use teleological representations of actions productively (2003, background): “People as well as children tend to interpret other people's behavior as goal-directed actions (Bekkering, Wohlschlager, & Gattis, 2000; Zacks, Tversky, & Iyer, 2001) and they extend these interpretations to the behavior of other animals and even to inanimate moving objects (Heider & Simmel, 1944).”
The Illusion of Conscious Will (2018, methodology): “This idea was illustrated in a classic study by Heider and Simmel (1944) in which people were asked to comment on a cartoon film of the motions of geometric objects—a big triangle T, a little triangle t, and a little circle c—around a box with an opening in it (fig.”
The Affordances for Social Psychology of the Ecological Approach to Social Knowing (2007, background): “…how informative kinematics (body movements in general) are to the perceiver of human social actions.3 The early contributions by Asch (1952), as well as those of Heider (1939; Heider & Simmel, 1944) and From (1971), on the perceptual aspects of social knowing have, in general, not been built upon.”
Contextualized Personality, beyond Traits (2015, background): “Narratives appear to be inescapable aspects of our personal and social lives, as they constitute viable and spontaneous routes by which we seek to understand a whole host of things, from random shapes moving on a screen (Heider & Simmel, 1944) to the very lives we are in the process of living.”
Social neuroscience evidence for dehumanised perception (2009, background): “Participants likewise infer the intentions of dots in biological motion (Heberlein, Adolphs, Tranel, & Damasio, 2004) and of shapes in non-random motion (Heider & Simmel, 1944).”
Development and neurophysiology of mentalizing. (2003, methodology): “An implicit mentalizing task which activated all three of these areas was based on the observation by Heider & Simmel (1944) that people will attribute intentions and desires to moving geometric shapes if these movements are of sufficient complexity.”
On the nature and origin of intuitive theories : learning, physics and psychology (2015, methodology): “They happen automatically, with people reading social meaning into even extremely impoverished visual displays: A short video of bland geometric shapes moving in a 2D world causes adults to spontaneously attribute to these shapes a host of aims and intentions [79].”
Domain-specific perceptual causality in children depends on the spatio-temporal configuration, not motion onset (2013, background): “…of what White calls interaction impressions, e.g., impressions of pulling, www.frontiersin.org July 2013 | Volume 4 | Article 365 | 1 bursting, etc., typically for interactions in the physical domain, while work in the Heider and Simmel (1944) tradition suggests extensions to the social domain.”
Almost human: Anthropomorphism increases trust resilience in cognitive agents. (2016, background): “Other dimensions that might evoke anthropomorphic perceptions may include biological motion (Heider & Simmel, 1944; Thompson, Trafton, & McKnight, 2011), perceived agency (de Melo, Gratch, & Carnevale, 2014; Fox et al., 2014), mind perception (Gray, Gray, & Wegner, 2007), intentionality (Wiese,…”