Dataset Information

Seeing is believing: neural mechanisms of action-perception are biased by team membership.

ABSTRACT: Group identification can lead to a biased view of the world in favor of "in-group" members. Studying the brain processes that underlie such in-group biases is important for a wider understanding of the potential influence of social factors on basic perceptual processes. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how people perceive the actions of in-group and out-group members, and how their biased view in favor of own team members manifests itself in the brain. We divided participants into two teams and had them judge the relative speeds of hand actions performed by an in-group and an out-group member in a competitive situation. Participants judged hand actions performed by in-group members as being faster than those of out-group members, even when the two actions were performed at physically identical speeds. In an additional fMRI experiment, we showed that, contrary to common belief, such skewed impressions arise from a subtle bias in perception and associated brain activity rather than decision-making processes, and that this bias develops rapidly and involuntarily as a consequence of group affiliation. Our findings suggest that the neural mechanisms that underlie human perception are shaped by social context.

SUBMITTER: Molenberghs P

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6870530 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Seeing is believing: neural mechanisms of action-perception are biased by team membership.

Molenberghs Pascal P Halász Veronika V Mattingley Jason B JB Vanman Eric J EJ Cunnington Ross R

Human brain mapping 20120130 9

Group identification can lead to a biased view of the world in favor of "in-group" members. Studying the brain processes that underlie such in-group biases is important for a wider understanding of the potential influence of social factors on basic perceptual processes. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how people perceive the actions of in-group and out-group members, and how their biased view in favor of own team members manifests itself in the ...[more]

PMID: 22290781

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Project description:A prevailing theory proposes that the brain's two visual pathways, the ventral and dorsal, lead to differing visual processing and world representations for conscious perception than those for action. Others have claimed that perception and action share much of their visual processing. But which of these two neural architectures is favored by evolution? Successful visual search is life-critical and here we investigate the evolution and optimality of neural mechanisms mediating perception and eye movement actions for visual search in natural images. We implement an approximation to the ideal Bayesian searcher with two separate processing streams, one controlling the eye movements and the other stream determining the perceptual search decisions. We virtually evolved the neural mechanisms of the searchers' two separate pathways built from linear combinations of primary visual cortex receptive fields (V1) by making the simulated individuals' probability of survival depend on the perceptual accuracy finding targets in cluttered backgrounds. We find that for a variety of targets, backgrounds, and dependence of target detectability on retinal eccentricity, the mechanisms of the searchers' two processing streams converge to similar representations showing that mismatches in the mechanisms for perception and eye movements lead to suboptimal search. Three exceptions which resulted in partial or no convergence were a case of an organism for which the targets are equally detectable across the retina, an organism with sufficient time to foveate all possible target locations, and a strict two-pathway model with no interconnections and differential pre-filtering based on parvocellular and magnocellular lateral geniculate cell properties. Thus, similar neural mechanisms for perception and eye movement actions during search are optimal and should be expected from the effects of natural selection on an organism with limited time to search for food that is not equi-detectable across its retina and interconnected perception and action neural pathways.

Dataset Information

Seeing is believing: neural mechanisms of action-perception are biased by team membership.

Publications

Seeing is believing: neural mechanisms of action-perception are biased by team membership.

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