Animates naturally capture our attention more than inanimates, and we often perceive animacy in non-living or artificial stimuli that display animate qualities (Rakison and Poulin-Dubois, 2001). However, Loucks et al. showed that not all animate things receive equal attention—mammals, for example, might be prioritized over insects. And though we usually think that perceiving animacy draws our attention, Saito et al. found that the reverse can also happen: we may perceive greater animacy in things that receive continued attention.

Research on animacy perception often focuses on the role of motion (Blakemore et al., 2003). Parovel reviewed how we automatically perceive animacy in simple “Heider-Simmel” animations, arguing that motion helps us identify living things and infer their psychological, emotional, and social characteristics. Torabian and Grossman discussed how children learn to see such movements as goal-directed and eventually attribute them to mental states like beliefs or desires. Animacy perception also has downstream consequences, as Mayer et al. found that people perceive anthropomorphized self-driving vehicles similarly to humans, and that humanlike qualities influence social judgments like responsibility and morality.

People tend to remember animate concepts better than inanimate ones (Nairne et al., 2024). While this effect is well-documented in adults, Bugaiska et al. found it occurs in older children but possibly not younger ones, likely due to their still-developing episodic memory skills. Serra and DeYoung showed that the animacy advantage in free-recall exists under both computer-paced and self-paced conditions, and that while participants' beliefs about animacy do not impact the animacy effect directly (DeYoung and Serra, 2021), they can influence processing decisions (e.g., self-paced study) and the size of the effect as a result. Mah et al. replicated Popp and Serra's (2016) finding of an inanimate advantage in cued-recall tasks, investigating (and ruling out) semantic similarity among animates as an explanation.

Living things tend to take precedence over non-living things in our speech and writing (Branigan et al., 2008). Czypionka et al. examined how easily people process German noun–noun pairs and found greater processing fluency when more animate words were included (e.g., “food bowl” vs. “dog food” vs. “sheep dog”). Lobben and Laeng used Construal Level Theory to explain linguistic puzzles involving prominence hierarchies (like animacy), concluding prominent concepts are less psychologically distant from the self. Sá-Leite et al. reviewed the picture-word interference paradigm, a tool for measuring retrievability, and noted that many studies have neglected animacy despite its known enhancement of cognitive and linguistic processing. Westbury explored how people decide if something is animate or not, challenging the notion that this is a simple, binary classification (see also VanArsdall and Blunt, 2022). His analyses suggest that people rely heavily on categorical family resemblance to judge animacy.