Believing is seeing: expectations alter visual awareness

Abstract

Summary Expectations have been shown to be powerful modulators of pain [1] and emotion [2] in placebo studies. In such experiments, expectations are induced by instructions combined with manipulation of the sensory experience that is unknown to the subjects. After an expectation learning phase where a painful stimulation is surreptitiously lowered following placebo application, the placebo effectively reduces subjective pain intensity in a subsequent test phase [3]. The strength of this placebo effect is closely related to the induced expectation [4]. Here, we asked whether this powerful cognitive bias reflects a general property of sensory information processing and tested whether the contents of visual awareness could be altered by a placebo-like expectation manipulation. We found a dramatic effect of experimentally induced expectations on the perception of an ambiguous visual motion stimulus. This shows that expectations have a strong and general influence on our experience of the sensory input independently of its specific type and content.