ИСТИНА

Introduction. The ability to differentiate between animate and inanimate objects has a high evolutionary significance. It is suggested that such categorization is based not on verbal coding, but on visual signs, since the ability to distinguish such categories arises in infancy (Spriet et al., 2022), even before the development of speech. This suggests the presence of a special category-specific perceptual mechanism of identifying animate objects.Methods. The participants of the experiment (n = 17, 15 of them were female, M = 18.53 years, SD = 1.18) were presented with a series of 330 static images in the form of black silhouettes on a gray background, which were used to eliminate the influence of movement, texture and color of the object, so it was possible to categorize the object only by its shape. Of the silhouettes presented, 156 images are categorized as animate objects (animals) and 174 to inanimate objects (tools, cutlery, transport, etc.). Each image was shown for 1500 ms, during which the participant was required to answer the question of whether the depicted object was larger than the participant himself or not. We specifically avoided asking participants to evaluate objects as animate/inanimate, so that the question itself would not affect the subject. During the experiment, a 60-channel EEG was recorded. Evoked potentials for animate and inanimate objects were obtained for each participant and the Student’s t-test was calculated (p<.05).Results. It was found that the evoked potentials (EP) for animate/inanimate objects significantly differed in frontal channels (N250 component; Fz, F4, F6, FC1, Fp1), as well as parietal and temporoparietal channels (P1, P3, P5, CP1, CP3, CP5, C3, PO7) of the left hemisphere in the form of a positive component P350-450.Conclusion. We believe that the very fact of the difference in visual evoked potentials in response to animate/inanimate objects suggests that there is a stage in processing visual information where such automatic categorization occurs even without explicit instructions to do so. Moreover, this categorization can occur exclusively evoked by a visual stimulus, in the absence of information about the movement, texture, and color of objects. Based on the data obtained, it can be assumed that this system consists of two components: temporal-parietal (categorization of the form) and frontal (increasing selective attention to animate stimuli).The research was supported by RSF, project No. 19-18-00474.