Final Report Summary - PEPE (Personal Perception)
For decades, scientists have understood perception to operate in what is called a “bottom-up” fashion with little influence from our general expectations or the social context in which we find ourselves. The current project set out to challenge these assumptions and has been successful in showing that “top-down” influences such as expectancies and any information pertaining to the self can have a profound impact on what we perceive. In spite of the untimely death of the PI and the reduction of the length of project all of the outcomes have been achieved. The team developed a number of new approaches which has enables the control of critical variables and the targeting of specific perceptual and attentional systems as well as higher-order processes involved in social judgments and conscious decision systems. This was achieved by creating a new way to study personal interest in perception using novel associative matching procedures. These procedures generate behavioral biases for self (vs. others), high monetary reward (vs. low monetary reward) and in-group (vs out-group). A unique aspect of this design is that it triggers common cognitive processes underlying a mental synthesis of a neutral object and a person (or reward value) in time and enables direct comparisons between the effects of self- and reward-relevance. Furthermore, in contrast to commonly used trait-judgment self-evaluations which reflect a need to evaluate external cues against internal representations of self in memory, the associative matching procedure does not require to shape and refine our conceptualizations of self, and, thus, eliminates response biases due to social desirability and affective meaning.
An important feature of the developed procedure is that it has been extensively tested in healthy participants of different ages, and shown to generate self-referential and emotion-referential effects robustly.
Participants are presented with a label (e.g. you, a friend, a stranger) and a shape (e.g. circle, square, triangle), which they are asked to learn and then match when the shape and a label are the same as initially presented or re-paired. After only 10 trials it turns out that participants are much faster and more accurate in responding to shapes that are associated with themselves relative to shapes that are associated with others (friends or strangers). The project went on to conduct a number of studies outlining in further detail the brain mechanisms underlying these effects. Specifically, we found that both self- and reward-biases have strong, but distinct representations across the anterior-posterior axis in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex – a region that plays an important role in self-control, decision making and emotion regulation. The dynamic interplay between the representations allows humans selectively respond to self- and reward relevant information.
These results form the basis of a new way of understanding social perception and cognition. In brief, the key findings are:
1. Basic perceptual processes can be modified by social factors;
Our findings demonstrate that social information is important for what we attend to – there are biases to select stimuli that are relevant ourselves (compared to other), higher reward value (compared to low reward value), positive emotional expressions (compared to neutral and negative emotions) and in-group attributes (compared to out-group). The results provide compelling evidence that even simple geometric shapes associated with self, happy emotional expression, higher monetary reward value and in-group membership rapidly alters basic perceptual processing by enhancing responding time and accuracy.
2. The behavioural effects of the biases are large, stable over time and show similar properties, in particular, for self- and reward- biases, and self- and emotion-biases, self and in-group biases suggesting that the biases may have the same origin. However, quantitative differences in the magnitude, and qualitative changes in processing efficiency indicate at least partly functional independence between the biases. For example, our research provides strong evidence that the effects of self are automatic and not easily overruled even if participants set an expectation for another stimulus (friend or stranger) on the trial. Furthermore, self-associated stimuli provide a strong cue for explicit shifts of attention to them, and that correct anti-saccades to such stimuli demand high levels of inhibition (which carries over to subsequent pro-saccade trials).
3. Self and reward biases have overlapped but functionally distinct neural coding in the vmPFC, but self and emotion, except a small portion of the posterior vmPFC, have largely non-overlapping representations in the brain. In contrast, emotion and in-group biases showed similar activation in the brain, in particular, in the amygdala, the anterior insula and the cingulate cortex.
4. The effects of social factors (race, in-group and self biases) on perceptual processes enhance integration of information by modulating perceptual processing. The modulatory effect of social biases on perception reflects quantitative and qualitative changes in the cognitive system. Quantitative changes are expressed in terms of response advantage that does not preclude changes in processing efficiency/capacity. Qualitative changes reflect increases in processing efficiency during information processing and are defined as supercapacity. Own-race biases in faces, self- and in-group biases consistently showed strong quantitative and qualitative changes in the system. The magnitude of the changes in processing efficiency/capacity is also related to individual differences (e.g. individual social experience with own versus other race faces, a strength of in-group identification, subjective value of reward amount, etc). Importantly, the new approach based on mathematical modelling that have been used to examine changes in processing efficiency and comparing the effects of different biases (e.g. comparing processing efficiency between self, reward and in-group biases has a potential for establishing the relationship and predictive inferences between different biases.
the personal and cultural significance of stimuli can have a profound effect on the allocation of attention; once a stimulus has been associated with the self then a series of brain mechanisms are activated that prime anything to do with self-representation. This leads to a deeper understanding of why information that is related to the self in some way has a strong influence on perception and attention. In summary, the PePe project has provided a deeper understanding of the social brain and has demonstrated that basic perception and attention cannot be divorced from higher-level cognitive processes, especially as they relate to ourselves and to our culture.
An important feature of the developed procedure is that it has been extensively tested in healthy participants of different ages, and shown to generate self-referential and emotion-referential effects robustly.
Participants are presented with a label (e.g. you, a friend, a stranger) and a shape (e.g. circle, square, triangle), which they are asked to learn and then match when the shape and a label are the same as initially presented or re-paired. After only 10 trials it turns out that participants are much faster and more accurate in responding to shapes that are associated with themselves relative to shapes that are associated with others (friends or strangers). The project went on to conduct a number of studies outlining in further detail the brain mechanisms underlying these effects. Specifically, we found that both self- and reward-biases have strong, but distinct representations across the anterior-posterior axis in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex – a region that plays an important role in self-control, decision making and emotion regulation. The dynamic interplay between the representations allows humans selectively respond to self- and reward relevant information.
These results form the basis of a new way of understanding social perception and cognition. In brief, the key findings are:
1. Basic perceptual processes can be modified by social factors;
Our findings demonstrate that social information is important for what we attend to – there are biases to select stimuli that are relevant ourselves (compared to other), higher reward value (compared to low reward value), positive emotional expressions (compared to neutral and negative emotions) and in-group attributes (compared to out-group). The results provide compelling evidence that even simple geometric shapes associated with self, happy emotional expression, higher monetary reward value and in-group membership rapidly alters basic perceptual processing by enhancing responding time and accuracy.
2. The behavioural effects of the biases are large, stable over time and show similar properties, in particular, for self- and reward- biases, and self- and emotion-biases, self and in-group biases suggesting that the biases may have the same origin. However, quantitative differences in the magnitude, and qualitative changes in processing efficiency indicate at least partly functional independence between the biases. For example, our research provides strong evidence that the effects of self are automatic and not easily overruled even if participants set an expectation for another stimulus (friend or stranger) on the trial. Furthermore, self-associated stimuli provide a strong cue for explicit shifts of attention to them, and that correct anti-saccades to such stimuli demand high levels of inhibition (which carries over to subsequent pro-saccade trials).
3. Self and reward biases have overlapped but functionally distinct neural coding in the vmPFC, but self and emotion, except a small portion of the posterior vmPFC, have largely non-overlapping representations in the brain. In contrast, emotion and in-group biases showed similar activation in the brain, in particular, in the amygdala, the anterior insula and the cingulate cortex.
4. The effects of social factors (race, in-group and self biases) on perceptual processes enhance integration of information by modulating perceptual processing. The modulatory effect of social biases on perception reflects quantitative and qualitative changes in the cognitive system. Quantitative changes are expressed in terms of response advantage that does not preclude changes in processing efficiency/capacity. Qualitative changes reflect increases in processing efficiency during information processing and are defined as supercapacity. Own-race biases in faces, self- and in-group biases consistently showed strong quantitative and qualitative changes in the system. The magnitude of the changes in processing efficiency/capacity is also related to individual differences (e.g. individual social experience with own versus other race faces, a strength of in-group identification, subjective value of reward amount, etc). Importantly, the new approach based on mathematical modelling that have been used to examine changes in processing efficiency and comparing the effects of different biases (e.g. comparing processing efficiency between self, reward and in-group biases has a potential for establishing the relationship and predictive inferences between different biases.
the personal and cultural significance of stimuli can have a profound effect on the allocation of attention; once a stimulus has been associated with the self then a series of brain mechanisms are activated that prime anything to do with self-representation. This leads to a deeper understanding of why information that is related to the self in some way has a strong influence on perception and attention. In summary, the PePe project has provided a deeper understanding of the social brain and has demonstrated that basic perception and attention cannot be divorced from higher-level cognitive processes, especially as they relate to ourselves and to our culture.