ArticleiScience2022
Seeing a Bayesian ghost: Sensorimotor activation leads to an illusory social perception.
Article in iScience, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Preparing to act follows Bayesian inference rules.iScience · 2025Article
- When perception meets grief: how the brain reconstructs person networks in response to absence.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Synchrony Across Brains.Annual review of psychology · 2025Review
- The role of torso stiffness and prediction in the biomechanics of anxiety: a narrative review.Frontiers in sports and active living · 2024Review
- Neural Signatures of Predictive Strategies Track Individuals Along the Autism-Schizophrenia Continuum.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2023Article
- TMS-induced inhibition of the left premotor cortex modulates illusory social perception.iScience · 2023Article
- Expectations of efficient actions bias social perception: a pre-registered online replication.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Based on our prior experiences we form social expectations and anticipate another person's response. Under certain conditions, these expectations can be so strong that they lead to illusory perception of another person who is actually not there (i.e., seeing a Bayesian ghost). We used EEG to investigate the neural correlates of such illusory social perception. Our results showed that activation of the premotor cortex predicted the occurrence of the Bayesian ghost, whereas its actual appearance was later accompanied by activation in sensorimotor and adjacent parietal regions. These findings confirm that our perception of others is so strongly affected by prior expectations, in such a way they can prompt illusory social perceptions associated with activity change in brain regions relevant for action perception. They also contribute to a better understanding of social interaction in healthy individuals as well as persons with mental illnesses, which can be characterized by illusory perception and social interaction difficulties.
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Registered trials
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