Linguistic labels cue biological motion perception and misperception

Slivac, K., Hervais-Adelman, A., Hagoort, P., & Flecken, M. (2021). Linguistic labels cue biological motion perception and misperception. Scientific Reports, 11: 17239. doi:10.1038/s41598-021-96649-1.
Linguistic labels exert a particularly strong top-down influence on perception. The potency of this influence has been ascribed to their ability to evoke category-diagnostic features of concepts. In doing this, they facilitate the formation of a perceptual template concordant with those features, effectively biasing perceptual activation towards the labelled category. In this study, we employ a cueing paradigm with moving, point-light stimuli across three experiments, in order to examine how the number of biological motion features (form and kinematics) encoded in lexical cues modulates the efficacy of lexical top-down influence on perception. We find that the magnitude of lexical influence on biological motion perception rises as a function of the number of biological motion-relevant features carried by both cue and target. When lexical cues encode multiple biological motion features, this influence is robust enough to mislead participants into reporting erroneous percepts, even when a masking level yielding high performance is used.
Publication type
Journal article
Publication date
2021

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