Benjamin van Buren

The automaticity of perceiving animacy: Goal-directed motion in simple shapes influences visuomotor behavior even when task-irrelevant

Visual processing recovers not only simple features, such as color and shape, but also seemingly higher-level properties, such as animacy. Indeed, even abstract geometric shapes are readily perceived as intentional agents when they move in certain ways, and such percepts can dramatically influence behavior. In the wolfpack effect, for example, subjects maneuver a disc around a display in order to avoid several randomly moving darts. When the darts point toward the disc, subjects (falsely) perceive that the darts are chasing them, and this impairs several types of visuomotor performance. Are such effects reflexive, automatic features of visual processing? Or might they instead arise only as contingent strategies in tasks in which subjects must interact with (and thus focus on the features of) such objects? We explored these questions in an especially direct way—by embedding such displays into the background of a completely independent “foraging” task. Subjects now moved their disc to collect small “food” dots (which appeared sequentially in random locations) as quickly as possible. The darts were task-irrelevant, and subjects were encouraged to ignore them. Nevertheless, foraging was impaired when the randomly moving darts pointed at the subjects’ disc, as compared to control conditions in which they were either oriented orthogonally to the subjects’ disc or pointed at another moving shape—thereby controlling for nonsocial factors. The perception of animacy thus influences downstream visuomotor behavior in an automatic manner, such that subjects cannot completely override the influences of seemingly animate shapes even while attempting to ignore them.

Intentionally distracting: Working memory is disrupted by the perception of other agents attending to you — even without eye-gaze cues

Of all the visual stimuli you can perceive, perhaps the most important are other people’s eyes. And this is especially true when those eyes are looking at you: direct gaze has profound influences, even at the level of basic cognitive processes such as working memory. For example, memory for the properties of simple geometric shapes is disrupted by the presence of other eyes gazing at you. But are such effects really specific to direct gaze per se? Seeing eyes is undoubtedly important, but presumably only because of what it tells us about the “mind behind the eyes” – i.e., about others’ attention and intentions. This suggests that the same effects might arise even without eyes, as long as an agent’s directed attention is conveyed by other means. Here we tested the impact on working memory of simple “mouth” shapes – which in no way resemble eyes, yet can still be readily seen as intentionally facing you (or not). Just as with gaze cues, the ability to detect changes in geometric shapes was impaired by direct (compared to averted) mouths – but not in very similar control stimuli that were not perceived as intentional. We conclude that this disruption of working memory reflects a general phenomenon of “mind contact,” rather than a specific effect of eye contact.

Visual Illusions as a Tool for Dissociating Seeing From Thinking: A Reply to Braddick (2018):

Researchers in our field—like pretty much everyone else—seem to have a collective fascination with visual illusions. A recentPerception editorial, however, wonders whether this is a good idea (Braddick, 2018). In particular, while acknowledging plenty of useful research on (and inspired by) various individual illusions, Braddick asks whether it is really helpful to identify illusions more broadly as a category: “what have we gained by putting them in the same box . . .?” (p. 1). Braddick’s suggestion is that doing so is a mistake motivated primarily by a superficial “innocent pleasure,” but that illusions as a category are actually “deeply unhelpful for science” (p. 1). In an explicit attempt to be provocative, Braddick even suggests that focusing on illusions as a natural kind (i.e. as a privileged grouping that reflects something important about the structure of the mind) is an “infantile disorder.” In this respect, Braddick’s editorial succeeds admirably: we are provoked! In particular, we are provoked to explain why we disagree: we think that “illusions” are a natural kind whose existence has profound implications for our (scientific!) understanding of seeing, thinking, and especially how seeing and thinking do and do not interact. This is a theme that has figured quite a lot in recent debates about how cognition may influence perception, but curiously it was not mentioned either in Braddick’s editorial or in subsequent defenses of the importance of illusions (e.g., Shapiro, 2018; Todorovic, 2018).