Elsevier

Brain and Cognition

Volume 112, March 2017, Pages 69-77
Brain and Cognition

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

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2016.05.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Social contextual knowledge can shape perception.

  • A Bayesian approach explains how high-level social factors change perception.

  • This framework also provides new experimental implications for social cognition.

Abstract

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, behaviour, 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.

Introduction

Humans 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 experimental evidence that social contextual factors such as goals, desires, emotions, social interpersonal knowledge and stereotypes can significantly influence even the earliest stages of perception. Even though social psychologists have made great strides in uncovering these early perceptual influences of social context, within social psychology there has been a lack of theoretical frameworks in which these findings can be organised. Standard models of human perception emphasize a bottom-up elaboration of sensory information, which imply that higher-level factors such as social context only have a role in later stages, after the corresponding perceptual content has been established. Here, we explore how “predictive perception”, based on the view of the human brain as a pro-active Bayesian hypothesis tester, provides a powerful theoretical framework in which to assimilate the body of experimental findings from social psychology that is now emerging. A key feature of this framework is its emphasis on bidirectional influences between incoming sensory data and prior expectations about the causes of this data (Clark, 2013, Friston, 2010, Hohwy, 2013, Seth, 2013). This allows researchers studying social cognition to frame questions about whether social context directly affects perceptual content, or whether it (merely) alters post-perceptual processes. In this way, this framework provides a strong basis from which to derive new, testable hypotheses that stand to substantially enrich the field of social psychological research.

Section snippets

Social perception

The idea that high-level social factors such as attitudes, goals and stereotypes can change low level perceptual processes is not new. In the mid-20th century the “New Look” movement made the case that social processes critically change basic cognitive functioning (Bruner, 1992). For example, Bruner and Goodman (Bruner & Goodman, 1947) showed that children from poor homes overestimated the size of coins compared to wealthy children. Unfortunately, in subsequent years, many of the New Look

Predictive perception

The visual system is serially attuned to sensory processing: hierarchically low levels are preferentially activated by local details, while hierarchically higher level visual areas respond to information that needs to be integrated and combined over larger visual angles (Van Essen et al., 1992, Zeki et al., 1991). This serial architecture has been the basis for an almost implicit assumption that visual processing is a serial, bottom-up process (Hochstein and Ahissar, 2002, Hubel and Wiesel, 1968

Implications for social perception

As described above, the essence of the predictive processing framework is that prior experience and existing knowledge constrains predictions about the causes of current sensory inputs. By combining priors with the actual sensory input, perceptual content is specified. Within such a framework, desires, goals, emotional states and individual or group-level social knowledge about others all have a potential

Conclusion

After a hiatus, social psychology has again turned its focus to exploring the interaction between high-level social knowledge and basic perceptual processing. At this point, evidence is mounting that a person’s desires and moods, and their knowledge about individuals and groups, can shape perceptual content. Adopting a view of human perception as a predictive process, that relies on internally generated predictions or priors, can not only explain how social knowledge can directly and seamlessly

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