Would someone whis never seen animation in their life be able to recognize animated humans?

Submitted by DelVoid t3_10mwg31 in askscience

Most of the world is familiarized with animation, having been exposed to it as a child or at some point of their teen life, but how would someone who's never been exposed to this simplification of the human form react? could adults who never saw animation before recognize anime humans?

(i think this fits under anthropology, but I'm not sure so pls tell me if it doesn't)

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Rahdit42 t1_j66gfqn wrote

There are ancient cave dwellings that have depictions of humans hunting animals that seem to have extra limbs, however when seen with the light of a flickering torch they seem to move. Animation has been with us a very long time. So I would say humans would instinctively be able to able to tell the difference.

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mfb- t1_j66wotr wrote

Do you stop them from ever drawing? Anime humans look much more realistic than the average drawings of a 4-year-old.

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Octavus t1_j66xgg9 wrote

Replying to mfb- (#1,544,437)

Humans also see faces and silhouettes everywhere, from clouds to coffee to toast. We are pattern recognition machines and are preprogrammed for certain patterns.

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Far-Contact7531 t1_j683p64 wrote

Children start drawing humans, animals, objects albeit very simplified versions of what they see, as a form of communication. And this seems to be part of human development, a process through which the brain starts to understand and learn the concept of the abstract.

Thus, yes, most probably, someone who was never exposed to animation will for sure understand and recognize it is a human. He/she may not understand what animation is but will understand that is an abstract representation of humans.

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davidgrayPhotography t1_j6896zn wrote

Almost certainly, because they would recognize basic parts of the anatomy that they could see or feel on their own / other peoples' bodies, such as arms and legs.

The human body is also really good (almost too good) at picking out faces, so even if you showed someone who had never seen anime before a character like Yugi Muto who has massive eyes, hair not typically seen on a person, and is often seen carrying weird devices on his arm, they'd be able to work out it was human.

You could take this question further by thinking about some hypotheticals. For example, if a person was chained up, facing a solid wall for their entire life (similar to Plato's Cave), and the only things they saw were the shadows of other humans walking past, would the person be able to identify a human by looking at them, based on what features they saw on the shadows? Or would they see the shadow and the person as two separate beings?

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