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Humans take a teleological stance when observing others’ actions, interpreting them as intentional and goal directed. In predictive processing accounts of social perception, this teleological stance would be mediated by a perceptual prediction of an ideal energy-efficient reference trajectory with which a rational actor would achieve their goals within the current environmental constraints. Hudson and colleagues (2018) tested this hypothesis in a series of experiments in which participants reported the perceived disappearance points of hands reaching for objects. They found that these judgments were biased towards the expected efficient reference trajectories. Observed straight reaches were reported higher when an obstacle needed to be overcome than if the path was clear. In contrast, unnecessarily high reaches over empty space were perceptually flattened. Moreover, these perceptual biases increased the more the environmental constraints and expected action trajectories were explicitly processed. These findings provide an important advance to our understanding of the mechanisms underlying social perception. The current replication tests the robustness of these findings and whether they uphold in an online setting.

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-qjp-10.1177_17470218221077102 for Is implicit Level-2 visual perspective-taking embodied? Spontaneous perceptual simulation of others��� perspectives is not impaired by motor restriction by Eleanor Ward, Giorgio Ganis, Katrina L McDonough and Patric Bach in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Social difficulties in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) may originate from an impaired top-down modulation of sensory information that prevents the spontaneous attribution of intentions to observed behaviour. However, although autistic people remain able to explicitly reason about others’ mental states, the effect of abstract intention information on perceptual processes has remained untested. We show that ASD participants (n=23) exhibit a predictive perceptual bias in the perception of other’s actions in response to prior knowledge of an actor’s intentions (“I’ll take it”, “I’ll leave it”), but not in response to the motion of the action itself (reach, withdrawal). Neurotypicals (n=23) exhibit a predictive bias in action perception due to both explicit high-level intention and low-level motion information. Perception in ASD is not immune from top-down modulation. However, the information must be explicitly presented independently from the stimulus itself, and not inferred from cues inherent in the stimulus.

Supplemental material, QJE-STD-19-257.R2-Supplementary_materials for Predictive person models elicit motor biases: The face-inhibition effect revisited by Kimberley C Schenke, Natalie A Wyer, Steven P Tipper and Patric Bach in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Embodied accounts of visual perspective taking suggest that judgements from another person’s perspective are less effortful if one’s own body position aligns with that of the other person, indicating a causal role of posture in visual perspective taking. Using our adapted mental rotation paradigm, here we tested whether movement has a causal role in perspective taking, by restricting participants’ movement in half of the experimental trials. Here we show, using our previously validated task, that the perceptual representation of another’s visual perspective is not influenced by participants’ ability to move. These data therefore rule out active physical movement as a causal explanation of visual perspective taking and instead argue that postural readjustments when making judgements from another’s perspective are a bodily consequence of the mental transformations of a person’s actual to imagined position in space.

Humans interpret others’ behaviour as intentional and goal-directed, expecting others to take the most energy-efficient path to achieve their goals. Recent studies have shown that these expectations of efficient action provide a perceptual prediction of an ideal efficient trajectory, against which the observed action is evaluated, resulting in a distorted perceptual representation of unexpected inefficient actions. Here we show that these predictions rely on the inferred intentionality of the stimulus. Participants observed an actor reach for an object with a straight or arched trajectory. The actions were made efficient or inefficient by adding or removing an obstructing object. The action disappeared mid-trajectory and participants reported the last seen position of the hand on a touch screen. Replicating previous research, judgments of inefficient actions were biased toward the efficient prediction (straight trajectories upward to avoid the obstruction, arched trajectories downward towards the target) In two further experiments, we removed intentional cues by replacing the hand with a non-agentive ball (Exp 2), and by removing the biological profile of the motion by depicting it move at a constant speed (Exp 3). Perceptual biases were substantially reduced when intentional cues were removed. Predictions of efficient action are at least partially perceptually represented and influence perceptual judgments of others actions, biasing them towards these expectations. These predictions emerge from attributions of intentionality to the observed actor, triggered by the perception of agency and kinematics that follow biological motion profiles.

Response time analysis, Non-Biological bject Experiment, Probe Experiment, Mask Experiment, Descriptive Tables for Main and Supplementary Experiments.

Observing someone else perform an action can lead to false memories of self-performance - the observation inflation effect. One explanation is that action simulation via mirror neuron activation during action observation is responsible for observation inflation by enriching memories of observed actions with motor representations. In three experiments we investigated this account of source memory failures, using a novel paradigm that minimized influences of verbalization and prior object knowledge. Participants worked in pairs to take turns acting out geometric shapes and letters. The next day, participants recalled either actions they had performed or those they had observed. Experiment 1 showed that participants falsely retrieved observed actions as self-performed, but also retrieved self-performed actions as observed. Experiment 2 showed that preventing participants from encoding observed actions motorically by taxing their motor system with a concurrent motor task did not lead to the predicted decrease in false claims of self-performance. Indeed, Experiment 3 showed that this was the case even if participants were asked to carefully monitor their recall. Because our data provide no evidence for a motor activation account, we also discussed our results in light of a source monitoring account.