A social Bayesian brain: How social knowledge can shape visual perception

Abstract

(2017) A social Bayesian brain: how social knowledge can shape visual perception. Brain and Cognition, 112. pp. 69-77. ISSN 0278-2626 This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/61149/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse:Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University.Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. A growing body of research suggests that social contextual factors such as desires and goals, affective states and stereotypes can shape early perceptual processes. We suggest that a generative Bayesian approach towards perception provides a powerful theoretical framework to accommodate how such high-level social factors can influence low-level perceptual processes in their earliest stages. We review experimental findings that show how social factors shape the perception and evaluation of people, behavior, and socially relevant objects or information. Subsequently, we summarize the generative view of perception within the 'Bayesian brain', and show how such a framework can account for the pervasive effects of top-down social knowledge on social cognition. Finally, we sketch the theoretical and experimental implications of social predictive perception, indicating new directions for research on the effects and neurocognitive underpinnings of social cognition. 3Humans are intensely social animals: social interaction in all shapes and sizes forms a core aspect of our existence. The things we know, both consciously (explicitly) and unconsciously (implicitly), about other people helps us to swiftly interpret their behaviour and respond appropriately. In recent years, evidence has mounted that social knowledge shapes not just how we interpret the world around us, but also how we perceive it (see for example Barrett & Bar, 2009). Research from experimental social psychology focussing mainly on visual perception suggests that social contextual factors can subtly but substantially change how a stimulus is processed, which in turn changes the percept that people experience. In this paper, we provide an overview of the ...

Perceptual sensitivity is modulated by what others can see

“…Indeed, in Experiment 3, response times were significantly speeded by congruent perspectives in both seeing and nonseeing conditions (thus tracking the low-level directional features of the avatar, consistent with recent findings; Cole, Atkinson, Le, & Smith, 2016;Conway, Lee, Ojaghi, Catmur, & Bird, 2017), whereas a boost in perceptual sensitivity was only observed in the seeing condition. Taken together, our findings suggest the avatar's viewpoint modulates early perceptual processing, thereby potentiating perception of stimuli for which others are also able to see and act upon (Otten, Seth, & Pinto, 2017;Teufel, Fletcher, & Davis, 2010).…”

“…The mechanism by which shared perception translates to enhanced perceptual sensitivity remains to be determined. An appealing hypothesis is that the avatar's viewpoint acts as an attentional cue to prioritise particular spatial locations (Otten et al, 2017), thereby leading to top-down potentiation of perceptual sensitivity. The presence or absence of the blindfold may in turn modulate the reliability of this prior (Summerfield & Egner, 2009).…”

Predictive social perception: Towards a unifying framework from action observation to person knowledge

“…Other evidence comes from studies that, while not addressing the prediction of behaviour, nevertheless show that high-level stereotype information can affect lower level perception (for a review, see Otten, Seth, & Pinto, 2016). It has been found, for example, that faces with African American features appear darker than luminancecontrolled European faces (Levin & Banaji, 2006), and that people more readily detect angry expressions in them (e.g., Otten & Banaji, 2012).…”

The Contribution of Sexual Identity Towards the Students’ Perception of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender

“…Then, Otten, Seth, & Pinto (2017) also state that perception is influenced by internal factors such as individual experience. Individual experiences will shape the sexual identity of individuals, so that sexual identity contributes to individuals in interpreting the LGBT phenomenon.…”