![]() The response of the participant determined whether the trial was a false alarm (agent absent, response “yes”), correct rejection (agent absent, response “no”), hit (agent present, response “yes”), or a miss (agent present, response “no”) trial. At the end of each trial, the participants’ task was to decide whether the masked agent B was present or absent (i.e., time segment (3) in Figure 1B). Agent B was masked by noise dots (i.e., signal trials) or replaced completely by noise dots (i.e., noise trials) in half of the trials each (i.e., time segment (2) in Figure 1B). They were then required to passively observe agent B who responded to agent A’s gesture. Participants were asked to passively watch agent A first, who either performed an individual (i.e., individual condition (IND)) or communicative (i.e., communicative condition (COM)) gesture (i.e., time segment (1) in Figure 1B). The screen displayed a well recognizable point-light walker (agent A) and a second point-light walker individually masked or replaced by randomly moving noise dots (agent B). To address this, we recorded the brain’s electrical activity using electroencephalography (EEG) while neurotypical participants performed an established experimental task using two point-light agents ( Figure 1) ( Zillekens et al., 2019). The underlying neural mechanisms for this form of illusory social perception remain elusive. ![]() Thus, the Bayesian ghost is a metaphorical term and does not refer to Bayesian statistics or modeling in this paper. We have adopted this term to describe the instance in which one has an illusory perception of a person because of prior expectations generated by another’s communicative gesture. This special erroneous outcome of predictive coding has been referred to as seeing a Bayesian ghost ( Manera et al., 2011b von der Lühe et al., 2016). Strong expectations can result in illusions, i.e., seeing a communicative action of one person increases the likelihood of expecting and actually seeing another person who, in fact, is not there. However, predictive coding can also produce erroneous perception. Interpersonal predictive coding applies this logic to the social domain and focuses on how prior knowledge and resulting expectations help us to understand social interactions, during which the behavior of one person can help to anticipate what the interaction partner will do ( Bolis et al., 2018 von der Lühe et al., 2016). Predictive coding accounts suggest that human beings possess Bayesian brains: The brain generates predictions and compares these to sensory input, which is especially advantageous in complex or noisy environments ( Manera et al., 2011a). The use of prior experience to generate expectations about the presence and consequent action of another person has been described as interpersonal predictive coding ( Manera et al., 2011b, 2011a von der Lühe et al., 2016). In addition, communicative actions by one person make it more likely to perceive another person to whom the action might be directed at ( Manera et al., 2011b). The ability to anticipate future events is crucial in social interactions, in which an action of one person may be predictive of a response by another. Our expectations then shape the way we perceive our environment, particularly in situations that require complex information processing such as social interactions. To navigate through our complex world, we use prior experience to generate expectations and anticipate events. They also contribute to a better understanding of social interaction in healthy individuals as well as persons with mental illnesses, which can be characterized by illusory perception and social interaction difficulties. These findings confirm that our perception of others is so strongly affected by prior expectations, in such a way they can prompt illusory social perceptions associated with activity change in brain regions relevant for action perception. Our results showed that activation of the premotor cortex predicted the occurrence of the Bayesian ghost, whereas its actual appearance was later accompanied by activation in sensorimotor and adjacent parietal regions. We used EEG to investigate the neural correlates of such illusory social perception. Under certain conditions, these expectations can be so strong that they lead to illusory perception of another person who is actually not there (i.e., seeing a Bayesian ghost). Based on our prior experiences we form social expectations and anticipate another person’s response.
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