About this Research Topic
People and animals – broadly, “animates” – are important, dynamic forces in the natural world.
They represent social targets such as friends and enemies, economic and romantic partners, predators and prey, and companions. Most importantly, unlike inanimate objects, animate agents have internal goals and drives that cause them to act on the world, rather than simply be acted on. In short, animates fill our world with novel causes, and have been a consistent selection pressure over the course of evolution – human and nonhuman. Cognitive scientists have long acknowledged the importance of animacy, investigating it as a perceptual phenomenon, as a component of language, a natural category, a demand on attention, a dimension of neurological organization, and more recently as an important factor in memory.
Although animacy has been a dimension of interest in cognitive science for quite some time, cognitive scientists from different subdisciplines interested in animacy (e.g., perception, attention, language, and memory) rarely talk with one another to synthesize findings across subfields.
A major goal of this research topic is to solicit articles from across cognitive science (in a broad sense) that investigate the role that animacy plays in cognition, in the hopes that authors and readers may begin to see the “bigger picture” regarding how animacy influences the mind. We hope that by bringing together researchers from across cognitive science we will hear from a diverse set of perspectives regarding animacy, representing a variety of research questions and methodologies within this larger topic. Likewise, we hope that the finished research topic will lead to an increased and more varied exploration of the role of animacy in our thoughts and actions and will appeal to readers across fields.
We are interested in submissions that explore the role of animacy in specific cognitive processes or across multiple cognitive processes. For example: the effect of animacy (or perceived animacy) on memory, attention, or linguistic processing; factors that lead people to perceive that something is alive or not; the effects of anthropomorphism on cognitive processes; whether people treat living things (animals) differently than nonliving things (objects); the ability of a species of animal to perceive animacy or to be affected by it as humans are; etc.
Frontiers considers a variety of different types of articles for publication. For this topic, our preference is for the following submission types: Original Research, Brief Research Report, Reviews (standard, systematic, mini), Hypothesis and Theory, Perspective, or General Commentary. However, we are also open to the following submission types: Case Report, Conceptual Analysis, Data Report, or Opinion.
They represent social targets such as friends and enemies, economic and romantic partners, predators and prey, and companions. Most importantly, unlike inanimate objects, animate agents have internal goals and drives that cause them to act on the world, rather than simply be acted on. In short, animates fill our world with novel causes, and have been a consistent selection pressure over the course of evolution – human and nonhuman. Cognitive scientists have long acknowledged the importance of animacy, investigating it as a perceptual phenomenon, as a component of language, a natural category, a demand on attention, a dimension of neurological organization, and more recently as an important factor in memory.
Although animacy has been a dimension of interest in cognitive science for quite some time, cognitive scientists from different subdisciplines interested in animacy (e.g., perception, attention, language, and memory) rarely talk with one another to synthesize findings across subfields.
A major goal of this research topic is to solicit articles from across cognitive science (in a broad sense) that investigate the role that animacy plays in cognition, in the hopes that authors and readers may begin to see the “bigger picture” regarding how animacy influences the mind. We hope that by bringing together researchers from across cognitive science we will hear from a diverse set of perspectives regarding animacy, representing a variety of research questions and methodologies within this larger topic. Likewise, we hope that the finished research topic will lead to an increased and more varied exploration of the role of animacy in our thoughts and actions and will appeal to readers across fields.
We are interested in submissions that explore the role of animacy in specific cognitive processes or across multiple cognitive processes. For example: the effect of animacy (or perceived animacy) on memory, attention, or linguistic processing; factors that lead people to perceive that something is alive or not; the effects of anthropomorphism on cognitive processes; whether people treat living things (animals) differently than nonliving things (objects); the ability of a species of animal to perceive animacy or to be affected by it as humans are; etc.
Frontiers considers a variety of different types of articles for publication. For this topic, our preference is for the following submission types: Original Research, Brief Research Report, Reviews (standard, systematic, mini), Hypothesis and Theory, Perspective, or General Commentary. However, we are also open to the following submission types: Case Report, Conceptual Analysis, Data Report, or Opinion.
Keywords: Agency, Animacy, Anthropomorphism, Attention, Categories and Concepts, Cognition, Comparative Psychology, Development, Language, Memory, Neuroscience, Perception
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
