Animacy and the prediction of behaviour

To survive, all animals need to predict what other agents are going to do next. We review neural mechanisms involved in the steps required for this ability. The first step is to determine whether an object is an agent, and if so, how sophisticated it is. This involves brain regions carrying representations of animate agents. The movements of the agent can then be anticipated in the short term based solely on physical constraints. In the longer term, taking into account the agent’s goals and intentions is useful. Observing goal directed behaviour activates the neural action observation network, and predicting future goal directed behaviour is helped by the observer’s own action generating mechanisms. Intentions are critically important in determining actions when interacting with other agents, as several intentions can lie behind an action. Here, interpretation is helped by prior beliefs about the agent and the brain’s mentalising system is engaged. Biologically-constrained computational models of action recognition exist, but equivalent models for understanding intentional agents remain to be developed.