Abstract
BackgroundVisual perception is not a passive process: in order to efficiently process visual input, the brain actively uses previous knowledge (e.g., memory) and expectations about what the world should look like. However, perception is not only influenced by previous knowledge. Especially the perception of emotional stimuli is influenced by the emotional state of the observer. In other words, how we perceive the world does not only depend on what we know of the world, but also by how we feel. In this study, we further investigated the relation between mood and perception.Methods and FindingsWe let observers do a difficult stimulus detection task, in which they had to detect schematic happy and sad faces embedded in noise. Mood was manipulated by means of music. We found that observers were more accurate in detecting faces congruent with their mood, corroborating earlier research. However, in trials in which no actual face was presented, observers made a significant number of false alarms. The content of these false alarms, or illusory percepts, was strongly influenced by the observers' mood.ConclusionsAs illusory percepts are believed to reflect the content of internal representations that are employed by the brain during top-down processing of visual input, we conclude that top-down modulation of visual processing is not purely predictive in nature: mood, in this case manipulated by music, may also directly alter the way we perceive the world.
Highlights
One of the key tasks of the visual system is to provide the brain’s executive systems with a stable, meaningful representation of the visual environment
As illusory percepts are believed to reflect the content of internal representations that are employed by the brain during top-down processing of visual input, we conclude that top-down modulation of visual processing is not purely predictive in nature: mood, in this case manipulated by music, may directly alter the way we perceive the world
In order to effectively process visual input, top-down information processing plays an important role in visual perception
Summary
One of the key tasks of the visual system is to provide the brain’s executive systems with a stable, meaningful representation of the visual environment. According to a number of recent neuroimaging studies, the context of a meadow would preactivate higher-level representations of object commonly encountered in meadows, such as cows. This information is fed back to earlier visual areas and compared with the actual perceptual input [2,3,4,5]. Visual perception is not a passive process: in order to efficiently process visual input, the brain actively uses previous knowledge (e.g., memory) and expectations about what the world should look like. We further investigated the relation between mood and perception
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