A day at a beach with a starfish man: Anthropomorphization of a cartoon starfish
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anthropomorphization is the process by which humans ascribe human form or attributes to non-human animals or objects. A recent study revealed that people anthropomorphized a cartoon starfish more strongly when the starfish had a face, than when the starfish did not have a face. Two experiments were conducted to determine if anthropomorphization of a cartoon, non-human animal (a starfish) occurs when: 1) visual elements associated with humans, such as clothing, were presented on the body, and 2) people read a story about the non-human cartoon character performing human activities. Participants completed body-part compatibility tasks in which they responded (thumb-press or foot-pedal) to a red or blue target (relevant feature) superimposed over the upper or lower limb (irrelevant feature) of a cartoon starfish, respectively. Experiment 1 consisted of two main presentation conditions: a starfish with a shirt and pants, and a starfish without clothing. Experiment 2 presented a starfish figure (without clothing) before and after participants read a story in which the starfish character went to the beach. Analysis of the RTs revealed body-part compatibility effects. Interestingly, the clothing and the story did not significantly modulate (increase) the magnitude of the compatibility effects. A possible explanation for such results could be that the pattern observed in both of the present experiments may be due to spatial compatibility rather than body-part compatibility effects. Alternatively, because the starfish did not have a face, the data from the series of experiments suggests that facial feature might be the key factor in facilitating anthropomorphization.Acknowledgments: This work was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".