Contextual perception under active inference

M Berk Mirza,Maell Cullen,Sukhi Shergill,Thomas Parr,Rosalyn J Moran

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-95510-9

Abstract

Human social interactions depend on the ability to resolve uncertainty about the mental states of others. The context in which social interactions take place is crucial for mental state attribution as sensory inputs may be perceived differently depending on the context. In this paper, we introduce a mental state attribution task where a target-face with either an ambiguous or an unambiguous emotion is embedded in different social contexts. The social context is determined by the emotions conveyed by other faces in the scene. This task involves mental state attribution to a target-face (either happy or sad) depending on the social context. Using active inference models, we provide a proof of concept that an agent’s perception of sensory stimuli may be altered by social context. We show with simulations that context congruency and facial expression coherency improve behavioural performance in terms of decision times. Furthermore, we show through simulations that the abnormal viewing strategies employed by patients with schizophrenia may be due to (i) an imbalance between the precisions of local and global features in the scene and (ii) a failure to modulate the sensory precision to contextualise emotions.

Highlights

Human social interactions depend on the ability to resolve uncertainty about the mental states of others
We introduce a mental state attribution task, where a targetface with either ambiguous or unambiguous emotion is embedded in different social contexts
We introduce a visual search task inspired by the social context appreciation task[1], where a target-face is embedded in different social contexts

Summary

Introduction

Human social interactions depend on the ability to resolve uncertainty about the mental states of others. Contextual information is crucial for mental state attribution An example of this is the social context appreciation task[1], where a target-character with ambiguous emotion is first presented by itself, and later within a social context (see Fig. 1A). We will use a similar paradigm to the social context appreciation task and demonstrate how context can alter perception This task involves embedding a target-face with either ambiguous or unambiguous emotion in different social contexts (e.g. happy, sad, etc.). By modulating the agent’s confidence in its visual inputs (or sensory precision)[2,3,4], we will show that the emotion of a target-character can be perceived differently under different social contexts In this task, the target-face can be embedded either in an affectively congruent, an incongruent social context or neither. In the social context appreciation task, people with schizophrenia were

Objectives

Methods

Conclusion