Sound effects have only minor contribution to perceptions of anthropomorphism and animacy of simple animated shapes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While studies of anthropomorphism have spanned many decades, there is little evidence of the role that sound effects may play. We present two studies into sound's influence on perceptions of anthropomorphism and animacy using simple geometric animated shapes. For the first study, conducted on 149 participants, we simplified the animation to just two "bumping" squares. Study Two recreated the Heider-Simmel study of 1944, and was conducted on 250 participants under five conditions: without sound, and with one of two different sound types (interface sounds and "anthropomorphic" robot sounds) with two stereo modes (fixed in stereo position, or binaurally panned with the movement). We had participants answer both the Individual Differences in Anthropomorphism Questionnaire and the Godspeed Questionnaire, with three additional questions added. Results showed that the sound had a minor impact on anthropomorphism and potency in Study One, but did not impact animacy. Study Two showed no significant effect on anthropomorphism or animacy, but did show an impact on perceived intelligence and perceptions of activity.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".