ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2018
Perceptual teleology: expectations of action efficiency bias social perception.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 27 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sonic Sleight of Hand: Sound Induces Illusory Distortions in the Perception and Prediction of Robot Action.International journal of social robotics · 2025Article
- Expectations of efficient actions bias social perception: a pre-registered online replication.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Cognitive load affects early processes involved in mentalizing robot behaviour.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Predictive action perception from explicit intention information in autism.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2021Article
- Affordance matching predictively shapes the perceptual representation of others' ongoing actions.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2020Article
- Seeing the Unexpected: How Brains Read Communicative Intent through Kinematics.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2020Article
- Cues to intention bias action perception toward the most efficient trajectory.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Perceptual teleology: expectations of action efficiency bias social perception.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
- The Biology and Evolution of the Three Psychological Tendencies to Anthropomorphize Biology and Evolution.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Review
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Primates interpret conspecific behaviour as goal-directed and expect others to achieve goals by the most efficient means possible. While this teleological stance is prominent in evolutionary and developmental theories of social cognition, little is known about the underlying mechanisms. In predictive models of social cognition, a perceptual prediction of an ideal efficient trajectory would be generated from prior knowledge against which the observed action is evaluated, distorting the perception of unexpected inefficient actions. To test this, participants observed an actor reach for an object with a straight or arched trajectory on a touch screen. The actions were made efficient or inefficient by adding or removing an obstructing object. The action disappeared mid-trajectory and participants touched the last seen screen position of the hand. Judgements of inefficient actions were biased towards the efficient prediction (straight trajectories upward to avoid the obstruction, arched trajectories downward towards the target). These corrections increased when the obstruction's presence/absence was explicitly acknowledged, and when the efficient trajectory was explicitly predicted. Additional supplementary experiments demonstrated that these biases occur during ongoing visual perception and/or immediately after motion offset. The teleological stance is at least partly perceptual, providing an ideal reference trajectory against which actual behaviour is evaluated.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.