Scientific Reports (Aug 2021)

Linguistic labels cue biological motion perception and misperception

  • Ksenija Slivac,
  • Alexis Hervais-Adelman,
  • Peter Hagoort,
  • Monique Flecken

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-96649-1
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11, no. 1
pp. 1 – 14

Abstract

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Abstract 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.