TMS-induced inhibition of the left premotor cortex modulates illusory social perception
Charline Peylo,
Elisabeth F. Sterner,
Yifan Zeng,
Elisabeth V.C. Friedrich,
Annika Bingger,
Gabriel Engelhardt,
Viola Gnam,
Marie Gottmann,
Christof Leininger,
Zdislava Lukasova,
Keno Mersmann,
Ada Özbey,
Liisbeth Pirn,
Jacob Riecke,
Sarah Schellnast,
Gina Marie Schowe,
Dominik Weidenhöfer,
Jasmin Wunderatzke,
Nele Wunner
Affiliations
Charline Peylo
Department of Psychology / Research Unit Biological Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, 80802 Bavaria, Germany
Elisabeth F. Sterner
Department of Psychology / Research Unit Biological Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, 80802 Bavaria, Germany; Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Neuroradiology / School of Medicine, Technical University of Munich, Munich, 81675 Bavaria, Germany
Yifan Zeng
Department of Psychology / Research Unit Biological Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, 80802 Bavaria, Germany
Elisabeth V.C. Friedrich
Department of Psychology / Research Unit Biological Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, 80802 Bavaria, Germany; Corresponding author
Summary: Communicative actions from one person are used to predict another person’s response. However, in some cases, these predictions can outweigh the processing of sensory information and lead to illusory social perception such as seeing two people interact, although only one is present (i.e., seeing a Bayesian ghost). We applied either inhibitory brain stimulation over the left premotor cortex (i.e., real TMS) or sham TMS. Then, participants indicated the presence or absence of a masked agent that followed a communicative or individual gesture of another agent. As expected, participants had more false alarms in the communicative (i.e., Bayesian ghosts) than individual condition in the sham TMS session and this difference between conditions vanished after real TMS. In contrast to our hypothesis, the number of false alarms increased (rather than decreased) after real TMS. These pre-registered findings confirm the significance of the premotor cortex for social action predictions and illusory social perception.
