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Affordance matching predictively shapes the perceptual representation of others' ongoing actions.

ABSTRACT: Predictive processing accounts of social perception argue that action observation is a predictive process, in which inferences about others' goals are tested against the perceptual input, inducing a subtle perceptual confirmation bias that distorts observed action kinematics toward the inferred goals. Here we test whether such biases are induced even when goals are not explicitly given but have to be derived from the unfolding action kinematics. In 2 experiments, participants briefly saw an actor reach ambiguously toward a large object and a small object, with either a whole-hand power grip or an index-finger and thumb precision grip. During its course, the hand suddenly disappeared, and participants reported its last seen position on a touch-screen. As predicted, judgments were consistently biased toward apparent action targets, such that power grips were perceived closer to large objects and precision grips closer to small objects, even if the reach kinematics were identical. Strikingly, these biases were independent of participants' explicit goal judgments. They were of equal size when action goals had to be explicitly derived in each trial (Experiment 1) or not (Experiment 2) and, across trials and across participants, explicit judgments and perceptual biases were uncorrelated. This provides evidence, for the first time, that people make online adjustments of observed actions based on the match between hand grip and object goals, distorting their perceptual representation toward implied goals. These distortions may not reflect high-level goal assumptions, but emerge from relatively low-level processing of kinematic features within the perceptual system. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

SUBMITTER: McDonough KL

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7391862 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Affordance matching predictively shapes the perceptual representation of others' ongoing actions.

McDonough Katrina L KL Costantini Marcello M Hudson Matthew M Ward Eleanor E Bach Patric P

Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance 20200507 8

Predictive processing accounts of social perception argue that action observation is a predictive process, in which inferences about others' goals are tested against the perceptual input, inducing a subtle perceptual confirmation bias that distorts observed action kinematics toward the inferred goals. Here we test whether such biases are induced even when goals are not explicitly given but have to be derived from the unfolding action kinematics. In 2 experiments, participants briefly saw an acto ...[more]

PMID: 32378934

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Project description:Probability matching is a classic theory of decision making that was first developed in models of cognition. Posterior probability matching, a variant in which observers match their response probabilities to the posterior probability of each response being correct, is being used increasingly often in models of perception. However, little is known about whether posterior probability matching is consistent with the vast literature on vision and hearing that has developed within signal detection theory. Here we test posterior probability matching models using two tools from detection theory. First, we examine the models' performance in a two-pass experiment, where each block of trials is presented twice, and we measure the proportion of times that the model gives the same response twice to repeated stimuli. We show that at low performance levels, posterior probability matching models give highly inconsistent responses across repeated presentations of identical trials. We find that practised human observers are more consistent across repeated trials than these models predict, and we find some evidence that less practised observers more consistent as well. Second, we compare the performance of posterior probability matching models on a discrimination task to the performance of a theoretical ideal observer that achieves the best possible performance. We find that posterior probability matching is very inefficient at low-to-moderate performance levels, and that human observers can be more efficient than is ever possible according to posterior probability matching models. These findings support classic signal detection models, and rule out a broad class of posterior probability matching models for expert performance on perceptual tasks that range in complexity from contrast discrimination to symmetry detection. However, our findings leave open the possibility that inexperienced observers may show posterior probability matching behaviour, and our methods provide new tools for testing for such a strategy.

Dataset Information

Affordance matching predictively shapes the perceptual representation of others' ongoing actions.

Publications

Affordance matching predictively shapes the perceptual representation of others' ongoing actions.

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