Expectations of efficient actions bias social perception: a pre-registered online replication

• Published in: Royal Society open science 2023-02, Vol.10 (2), p.220889
• Main Authors: McDonough, Katrina L, Bach, Patric
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: action efficiency; action prediction; predictive processing; Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience; representational momentum; social perception; teleological reasoning
• ISSN: 2054-5703; 2054-5703
• DOI: 10.1098/rsos.220889

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 , 20180638. (doi:10.1098/rspb.2018.0638)) 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 judgements 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. By 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.