Serial bias in the perception of biological motion emotional states

Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2023-05-15

Tan, Haoyuan Zhu, Xiangrui Shen, Zaixu Shi, Shenghao Kuai, Yijie

Abstract： People can judge the emotions of other individuals by their movements, which are influenced by previously occurring movements, possibly because previously occurring movements provide a priori information about the current. In the current study, we presented sequences of biological motion of different emotional states and examined the influence of previously occurring actions on the evaluation of emotion for the current action in the biological motion sequence. We found that: first, emotion evaluation for the current biological motion systematically deviated from, rather than bias toward, past evaluation, showing a repulsive bias, with the amplitude of the bias negatively correlated with overall emotion recognition error. Second, the amplitude of the bias was not found to correlate with autistic traits or empathy, but with third-person movement imagery. Results tentatively suggest that there is no attractive bias in biological motion emotion perception, and the repulsive bias produced by previously observed biological motion states on current evaluation is an adaptation-like aftereffect, which enhances the accuracy of emotion recognition, but it is part of general visual cognitive rather than social cognitive functioning.

Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review

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