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- Title
The Second-Agent Effect: Communicative Gestures Increase the Likelihood of Perceiving a Second Agent.
- Authors
Manera, Valeria; Del Giudice, Marco; Bara, Bruno G.; Verfaillie, Karl; Becchio, Cristina
- Abstract
Background: Beyond providing cues about an agent's intention, communicative actions convey information about the presence of a second agent towards whom the action is directed (second-agent information). In two psychophysical studies we investigated whether the perceptual system makes use of this information to infer the presence of a second agent when dealing with impoverished and/or noisy sensory input. Methodology/Principal Findings: Participants observed point-light displays of two agents (A and B) performing separate actions. In the Communicative condition, agent B's action was performed in response to a communicative gesture by agent A. In the Individual condition, agent A's communicative action was replaced with a non-communicative action. Participants performed a simultaneous masking yes-no task, in which they were asked to detect the presence of agent B. In Experiment 1, we investigated whether criterion c was lowered in the Communicative condition compared to the Individual condition, thus reflecting a variation in perceptual expectations. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the congruence between A's communicative gesture and B's response, to ascertain whether the lowering of c in the Communicative condition reflected a truly perceptual effect. Results demonstrate that information extracted from communicative gestures influences the concurrent processing of biological motion by prompting perception of a second agent (second-agent effect). Conclusions/Significance: We propose that this finding is best explained within a Bayesian framework, which gives a powerful rationale for the pervasive role of prior expectations in visual perception.
- Subjects
COMMUNICATIVE action; SOCIAL theory; ACTION theory (Psychology); PUBLIC sphere; SENSE organs; SIMILARITY (Psychology); VISUAL perception; EXPERIMENTAL psychology
- Publication
PLoS ONE, 2011, Vol 6, Issue 7, p1
- ISSN
1932-6203
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0022650