New paper by Piotr Szymanek, Magdalena Senderecka, and Mateusz Hohol on how expectations drive biological motion detection is out in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review in Open Access:
Szymanek, P., Senderecka, M., & Hohol, M. (2026). I see moving people: Expectations drive detection of biological motion in noisy point-light displays. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 33(1), 51. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02839-7
Take home messages:
- Expectations shape biological motion perception: Beliefs about how likely it is to encounter a human walker bias detection judgments, even when the sensory input is identical.
- Top-down effects matter most under uncertainty: Expectation-driven biases were strongest when visual noise was highest and perceptual information least reliable.
- High expectations increase “yes” responses: Participants led to expect frequent human walkers were more likely to report seeing one, regardless of actual stimulus frequency.
- Bias, not sensitivity, drives the effect: The findings point to a decisional bias rather than improved perceptual accuracy.
- Supports predictive processing accounts of agency detection: The results align with models proposing that expectations combined with ambiguous input can produce false-positive perceptions of agents, including supernatural ones.
