We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Illusory object recognition is either perceptual or cognitive in origin depending on decision confidence.
- Authors
Alilović, Josipa; Lampers, Eline; Slagter, Heleen A.; van Gaal, Simon
- Abstract
We occasionally misinterpret ambiguous sensory input or report a stimulus when none is presented. It is unknown whether such errors have a sensory origin and reflect true perceptual illusions, or whether they have a more cognitive origin (e.g., are due to guessing), or both. When participants performed an error-prone and challenging face/house discrimination task, multivariate electroencephalography (EEG) analyses revealed that during decision errors (mistaking a face for a house), sensory stages of visual information processing initially represent the presented stimulus category. Crucially however, when participants were confident in their erroneous decision, so when the illusion was strongest, this neural representation flipped later in time and reflected the incorrectly reported percept. This flip in neural pattern was absent for decisions that were made with low confidence. This work demonstrates that decision confidence arbitrates between perceptual decision errors, which reflect true illusions of perception, and cognitive decision errors, which do not. The occurrence of perceptual illusions, the misinterpretation of sensory input, is a common characteristic of several neurological and psychiatric disorders. This study shows that such illusions have both perceptual as well as cognitive neural origins in the healthy human brain.
- Subjects
RECOGNITION (Psychology); OBJECT recognition (Computer vision); PERCEPTUAL illusions; OPTICAL information processing; HOUSING discrimination; CONFIDENCE; FUSIFORM gyrus
- Publication
PLoS Biology, 2023, Vol 21, Issue 3, p1
- ISSN
1544-9173
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1371/journal.pbio.3002009