Linguistic labels cue biological motion perception and misperception

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

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-96649-1

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.

Highlights

Linguistic labels exert a strong top-down influence on perception
Using random dot motion (RDM) set at the coherence decision limen, it has been shown that motion verbs as linguistic cues bias the perception of RDMs—verbs congruent with direction of the dominant motion vector of RDMs facilitate the judgement of its principal motion direction, while incongruent verbs reduce the accuracy
The results indicate that participants were less conservative with their answers when cued by congruent biological motion words than other lexical cues

Summary

Introduction

Linguistic labels exert a strong top-down influence on perception. The potency of this influence has been ascribed to their ability to evoke category-diagnostic features of concepts. The label feedback hypothesis formalised this supposition, positing that while non-linguistic cues, such as sounds or pictures, are necessarily exemplar-bound, linguistic labels activate categorical representations by abstracting from the idiosyncrasies of individual category members and emphasising the diagnostic features of that c ategory[13]. In doing so, they are able to activate a perceptual template that effectively warps the neural activation towards the labelled c ategory[14,15]. These studies provide evidence that the perception of dynamic stimuli is susceptible to linguistic influence

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