ABSTRACT
We hold that the origin and development of the animate-inanimate distinction benefits from principled, domain-specific considerations about causality (Gelman, 1990; Gelman, Durgin, & Kaufman, 1995; Gelman & Spelke, 1981; Williams, 2000; Williams & Gelman, 1995). We share with Caramazza (Chapter 1 and Caramazza & Shelton, 1998) the view that the animate-inanimate distinction is domain-specific, universal, and at least as much conceptual as it is perceptual. Our position is consistent with Heider and Simmel’s (1944) argument that the motion paths of objects and their interactions are interpreted with schemas (see also Goffman, 1974; Hochberg, 1978). It also dovetails with Keil’s ideas about mental devices that resonate to domain-relevant inputs (Keil, 1995; Keil, Kim, & Greif, Chapter 13) and Leslie’s (1995) assumptions that animate objects have agency and are goal-directed. Our perspective differs from ones that attribute the acquisition of the animateinanimate distinction to either general information perceptual and semantic processes (Warrington & Shallice, 1984), the sensory and/or perceptual detection of different kinds of motion variables, and/or the subsequent abstraction of various kinds of motion schemes for animate and inanimate objects (Oakes & Cohen, 1995; Mandler, 1992 and Chapter 11; Premack, 1995).
