Effects of expectation on face perception and its association with expertise

Mares, Inês, Smith, Fraser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8016-5109, Goddard, E. J., Keighery, Lianne, Papasavva, Michael, Ewing, Louise ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5263-1267 and Smith, Marie L. (2024) Effects of expectation on face perception and its association with expertise. Scientific Reports, 14. ISSN 2045-2322

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Abstract

Perceptual decisions are derived from the combination of priors and sensorial input. While priors are broadly understood to reflect experience/expertise developed over one’s lifetime, the role of perceptual expertise at the individual level has seldom been directly explored. Here, we manipulate probabilistic information associated with a high and low expertise category (faces and cars respectively), while assessing individual level of expertise with each category. 67 participants learned the probabilistic association between a color cue and each target category (face/car) in a behavioural categorization task. Neural activity (EEG) was then recorded in a similar paradigm in the same participants featuring the previously learned contingencies without the explicit task. Behaviourally, perception of the higher expertise category (faces) was modulated by expectation. Specifically, we observed facilitatory and interference effects when targets were correctly or incorrectly expected, which were also associated with independently measured individual levels of face expertise. Multivariate pattern analysis of the EEG signal revealed clear effects of expectation from 100 ms post stimulus, with significant decoding of the neural response to expected vs. not stimuli, when viewing identical images. Latency of peak decoding when participants saw faces was directly associated with individual level facilitation effects in the behavioural task. The current results not only provide time sensitive evidence of expectation effects on early perception but highlight the role of higher-level expertise on forming priors.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Data availability: Code for analysis of the behavioural data and ERP analysis of the EEG data is available at https://osf.io/gmz8k/. The code underpinning the MVPA analysis (which was fine-tuned for the present work) is available at https://github.com/fws252/Mares_etal_Cortex_2022. Raw data from consenting participants is available online at Birkbeck Research Data Repository (https://researchdata.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/214/), data from the remaining participants (N = 10) can be obtained upon request to the corresponding author (IM). Funding information: This project was funded by Bial Foundation (129/20). IM was further supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Técnologia (ID/04810/2020). Rights Retention Statement: For the purposes of open access, the authors have applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any author accepted manuscript version arising from this submission.
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Cognition, Action and Perception Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Developmental Science
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	09 Apr 2024 12:30
Last Modified:	24 Apr 2024 16:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/94878
DOI:	10.1038/s41598-024-59284-0

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