Clare Press

• Birkbeck, University of London

In recent years, there has been growing interest in how we perceive dyadic interactions between people. It has been proposed that pairs of individuals shown upright and face-to-face recruit a form of configural processing, similar to that engaged by upright faces. This processing is thought to aid the detection and interpretation of social interact...

The PI20 is a self-report questionnaire that assesses the presence of lifelong face recognition difficulties. The items on this scale ask respondents to assess their face recognition ability relative to the rest of the population, either explicitly or implicitly. Recent reports suggest that the PI20 scores of autistic participants exhibit little or...

The visual processing differences seen in autism often impede individuals' visual perception of the social world. In particular, many autistic people exhibit poor face recognition. Here, we sought to determine whether autistic adults also show impaired perception of dyadic social interactions—a class of stimulus thought to engage face‐like visual p...

The PI20 is a self-report questionnaire that assesses the presence of lifelong face recognition difficulties. The items on this scale ask respondents to assess their face recognition ability relative to the rest of the population, either explicitly or implicitly. Recent reports suggest that the PI20 scores of autistic participants exhibit little or...

‘Predictive processing’ frameworks of cortical functioning propose that neural populations in different cortical layers serve distinct roles in representing the world. There are distinct testable theories within this framework that we examined with a 7T fMRI study, where we contrasted responses in primary visual cortex (V1) to expected (75% likely)...

Perceivers can use past experiences to make sense of ambiguous sensory signals. However, this may be inappropriate when the world changes and past experiences no longer predict what the future holds. Optimal learning models propose that observers decide whether to stick with or update their predictions by tracking the uncertainty or “precision” of...

Forming expectations about what we are likely to perceive often facilitates perception. We forge such expectations on the basis of strong statistical relationships between events in our environment. However, due to our ever-changing world these relationships often subsequently degrade or even disappear, yet it is unclear how these altered statistic...

For decades, classic theories of action control and action awareness have been built around the idea that the brain predictively ‘cancels’ expected action outcomes from perception. However, recent research casts doubt over this basic premise. What do these new findings mean for classic accounts of action? Should we now ‘cancel’ old data, theories a...

For decades, classic theories of action control and action awareness have been built around the idea that the brain predictively ‘cancels’ expected action outcomes. However, recent research casts doubt over this basic premise. What do these new findings mean for classic accounts of action? Should we now ‘cancel’ old data, theories and approaches ge...

Healthy aging is associated with decline in social, emotion, and identity perception, which is frequently attributed to deterioration of structures involved in social inference. It is believed that this decline is unlikely to be a result of perceptual aberrations due to intact (corrected) visual acuity. Nevertheless, the present studies examine whe...

Perceivers can use past experiences to make sense of ambiguous sensory signals. However, this may be inappropriate when the world changes and past experiences no longer predict what the future holds. Optimal learning models propose that observers decide whether to stick with or update their predictions by tracking the uncertainty or ‘precision’ of...

Forming expectations about what we are likely to perceive often facilitates perception. We forge such expectations on the basis of strong statistical relationships between events in our environment. However, due to our ever-changing world these relationships often subsequently degrade or even disappear, yet it is unclear how these altered statistic...

In this My word, Press et al. tackle the 'theory crisis' in cognitive science. Using examples of good and not-so-good theoretical practice, they distinguish theories from effects, predictions, hypotheses, typologies, and frameworks in a self-help checklist of seven questions to guide theory construction, evaluation, and testing.

It is widely believed that predicted tactile action outcomes are perceptually attenuated. The present experiments determined whether predictive mechanisms necessarily generate attenuation or, instead, can enhance perception—as typically observed in sensory cognition domains outside of action. We manipulated probabilistic expectations in a paradigm...

Studies have found age-related deficits in face processing, including identity and emotion recognition. It is unclear what underlies such atypicalities, and why older adults are unaffected in other apparently similar perceptual tasks. The present study examined the possibility that particular deficits in configural processing impair the perception...

We predict how our actions will influence the world around us. Prevailing models in the action control literature propose that we use these predictions to suppress or “cancel” perception of expected action outcomes, to highlight more informative surprising events. However, contrasting normative Bayesian models in sensory cognition suggest that we a...

We frequently experience feelings of agency over events we do not objectively influence - so-called 'illusions of control'. These illusions have prompted widespread claims that we can be insensitive to objective relationships between actions and outcomes, and instead rely on grandiose beliefs about our abilities. However, these illusory biases coul...

Bayesian brain theories suggest that perception, action and cognition arise as animals minimise the mismatch between their expectations and reality. This principle could unify cognitive science with the broader natural sciences, but leave key elements of cognition and behaviour unexplained.

Research with adults suggests that we interpret the internal states of others from kinematic cues, using models calibrated to our own action experiences. Changes in action production that occur during adolescence may therefore have implications for adolescents' understanding of others. Here we examined whether, like adults, adolescents use velocity...

It is widely believed that predicted tactile action outcomes are perceptually attenuated. The present experiments determined whether predictive mechanisms always generate attenuation, or instead can enhance perception – as typically observed in sensory cognition domains outside of action. We manipulated probabilistic expectations in a paradigm ofte...

We thank Corlett for his thought-provoking response to our recent article. Corlett shares our concerns about inconsistencies in theories of perceptual prediction and highlights some reminiscent debates in learning theory. He also proposes why the perceptual prediction mechanisms may operate differently in the domain of action relative to other doma...

We frequently experience feelings of agency over events we do not objectively influence – so-called ‘illusions of control’. These illusions have prompted widespread claims that we can be insensitive to objective relationships between actions and outcomes, and instead rely on grandiose beliefs about our abilities. However, these illusory biases coul...

Bayesian brain theories suggest that perception, action and cognition arise as creatures minimise the mismatch between their expectations and reality. This principle could unify cognitive science with the broader natural sciences, but leave key elements of cognition and behaviour unexplained.

From the noisy information bombarding our senses, our brains must construct percepts that are veridical - reflecting the true state of the world - and informative - conveying what we did not already know. Influential theories suggest that both challenges are met through mechanisms that use expectations about the likely state of the world to shape p...

From the noisy information bombarding our senses our brains must construct percepts that are veridical – reflecting the true state of the world – and informative – conveying the most important information for adjusting our beliefs and behaviour. Influential theories in the cognitive sciences suggest that both of these challenges are met through mec...

Prior knowledge shapes what we perceive. A new brain stimulation study suggests that this perceptual shaping is achieved by changes in sensory brain regions before the input arrives, with common mechanisms operating across different sensory areas.

A range of processes are required for recognizing others' affective states. It is particularly important that we process the perceptual cues providing information about these states. These experiments tested the hypothesis that difficulties with affective state identification in older adults (OAs) arise, at least partly, from deficits in perceptual...

We predict how our actions will influence the world around us. Prevailing models of action control propose that we use these predictions to suppress or ‘cancel’ perception of expected action outcomes. However, contrasting normative Bayesian models in sensory cognition suggest that top-down predictions bias observers toward perceiving what they expe...

It has been hypothesized that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (hereafter “autism”) have problems perceiving biological motion, which contributes to their social difficulties. However, the ability to perceive the kinematic profile characteristic of biological motion has not been systematically examined in autism. To examine this basic perc...

Bayesian theories of perception have traditionally cast the brain as an idealised scientist, refining predictions about the outside world based on evidence sampled by the senses. However, recent predictive coding models include predictions that are resistant to change, and these stubborn predictions can be usefully incorporated into cognitive model...

It has been hypothesized that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (hereafter ‘autism’) have problems perceiving biological motion, which contributes to their social difficulties. However, the ability to perceive the kinematic profile characteristic of biological motion has not been systematically examined in autism. To examine this basic perc...

When we produce actions we predict their likely consequences. Dominant models of action control suggest that these predictions are used to ‘cancel’ perceptual processing of expected outcomes. However, normative Bayesian models of sensory cognition developed outside of action propose that rather than being cancelled, expected sensory signals are rep...

The perception of subsecond durations in adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (hereafter 'autism'; n=25 Experiment 1, n=21 Experiment 2) and matched typical adults (n=24 Experiment 1, n=22 Experiment 2) was examined by requiring participants to perform an action in time with auditory (Experiment 1) or visual (Experiment 2) events. Individuals with...

Perception during action is optimized by sensory predictions about the likely consequences of our movements. Influential theories in social cognition propose that we use the same predictions during interaction, supporting perception of similar reactions in our social partners. However, while our own action outcomes typically occur at short, predict...

Our movement kinematics provide useful cues about our affective states. Given that our experiences furnish models that help us to interpret our environment, and that a rich source of action experience comes from our own movements, the present study examined whether we use models of our own action kinematics to make judgments about the affective sta...

The alpha mu rhythm (8-13 Hz) has been considered to reflect mirror neuron activity due to the fact that it is attenuated by both action observation and action execution. The putative link between mirror neuron system activity and the mu rhythm has been used to study the involvement of the mirror system in a wide range of socio-cognitive processes...

Models of action control suggest that predicted action outcomes are “cancelled” from perception, allowing agents to devote resources to more behaviorally relevant unexpected events. These models are supported by a range of findings demonstrating that expected consequences of action are perceived less intensely than unexpected events. A key assumpti...

Perceptual systems must rapidly generate accurate representations of the world from sensory inputs that are corrupted by internal and external noise. We can typically obtain more veridical representations by integrating information from multiple channels, but this integration can lead to biases when inputs are, in fact, not from the same source. Al...

A range of behavioural and neuroimaging evidence demonstrates that we mirror observed human action in our motor systems to a greater extent than similar non-biological movement. This chapter reviews such evidence, considering the form and kinematic features of observed stimuli to which mirror mechanisms are sensitive. It subsequently considers the...

Recent work suggests that we are better at interpreting the movements of others who move like us, and that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) move in a quantifiably different way from typical individuals. Therefore, ‘social impairments’ exhibited by individuals with ASD may, at least in part, represent a failure by typical individuals...

Different affective states have previously been shown to have specific kinematic signatures, for example, sad movements tend to be slow, and angry movements are fast and accelerated. We likely use these kinematic signatures to help us to perceive affective states in others. If so, our models of the kinematic-affective state correspondence may be ba...

Sensory predictions made by the motor system during movement are likely to facilitate adaptive interaction with the sensory world. Recently, it has been suggested that agents may use the same sensorimotor models to anticipate the consequences of their own movements and to predict matching behaviours in others (i.e., imitative reactions). Under this...

Book synopsis: The Wiley Handbook on the Cognitive Neuroscience of Learning charts the evolution of associative analysis and the neuroscientific study of behavior as parallel approaches to understanding how the brain learns that both challenge and inform each other. Covers a broad range of topics while maintaining an overarching integrative approa...

The difficulties encountered by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) when interacting with neurotypical (NT, i.e. nonautistic) individuals are usually attributed to failure to recognize the emotions and mental states of their NT interaction partner. It is also possible, however, that at least some of the difficulty is due to a failure of...

Preoccupation with action-specific simulation theory, whereby covert imitation is thought to facilitate action interpretation, has overshadowed evidence that motor structures facilitate perception of numerous visual events extending far beyond others' actions. In light of these domain-general motor contributions to perception, the case for a specia...

The control of neurological networks supporting social cognition is crucially important for social interaction. In particular, the control of imitation is directly linked to interaction quality, with impairments associated with disorders characterized by social difficulties. Previous work suggests inferior frontal cortex (IFC) and the temporopariet...

Similar cortical activations during the experience and observation of touch suggest the presence of a tactile mirroring system. However, the specificity of observation-related activity - i.e., whether observation excites the same representations as experience of that specific tactile stimulation - is still to be established. Furthermore, central mu...

Perceiving the sensory consequences of action accurately is essential for appropriate interaction with our physical and social environments. Successful interaction with the environment requires perception not only of the nature of our action outcomes (e.g., somatosensation on the fingertips when grasping a cup), but also crucially, the onset and du...

Perceiving the sensory consequences of action accurately is essential for appropriate interaction with our physical and social environments. Prediction mechanisms are considered necessary for fine-tuned sensory control of action, yet paradoxically may distort perception. Here, we examine this paradox by addressing how movement influences the percei...

The extent to which different stimulus elements move together, namely their relative phase, is a central visual feature of many social and physical systems; characterizing everything from the oscillations of a walker's limbs to the alternating lights at pedestrian crossings. The experiments described here provide the first evidence of a motor contr...

Over the last century, researchers and laypeople alike have been captivated by synaesthesia—a developmental condition present in approximately 5% of the adult population, where the presentation of an “inducer” stimulus gives rise to additional “concurrent” sensation absent from the veridical sensory world (Ward, 2013). For example, the most common...

This article argues that mirror neurons originate in sensorimotor associative learning and therefore a new approach is needed to investigate their functions. Mirror neurons were discovered about 20 years ago in the monkey brain, and there is now evidence that they are also present in the human brain. The intriguing feature of many mirror neurons is...

Commentators have tended to focus on the conceptual framework of our article, the contrast between genetic and associative accounts of mirror neurons, and to challenge it with additional possibilities rather than empirical data. This makes the empirically focused comments especially valuable. The mirror neuron debate is replete with ideas; what it...

Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) are associated with diminished responsiveness to social stimuli, and especially to social rewards such as smiles. Atypical responsiveness to social rewards, which reinforce socially appropriate behavior in children, can potentially lead to a cascade of deficits in social behavior. Individuals with ASC often show dim...

When we observe object-directed actions such as grasping, we make predictive eye movements. However, eye movements are reactive when observing similar actions without objects. This reactivity may reflect a lack of attribution of intention to observed actors when they perform actions without 'goals'. Alternatively, it may simply signal that there is...

Individuals with autism spectrum conditions have difficulties in understanding and responding appropriately to others. Additionally, they demonstrate impaired perception of biological motion and problems with motor control. Here we investigated whether individuals with autism move with an atypical kinematic profile, which might help to explain perc...

Mirror neurons may be a genetic adaptation for social interaction [1]. Alternatively, the associative hypothesis [2], [3] proposes that the development of mirror neurons is driven by sensorimotor learning, and that, given suitable experience, mirror neurons will respond to any stimulus. This hypothesis was tested using fMRI adaptation to index popu...

There has been recent controversy about whether activation in the human inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and Brodmann Area (BA) 6 when observing actions indicates operation of mirror neurons. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data have demonstrated repetition suppression (RS) effects in posterior IFG which are consistent with the pres...

The 'action observation network' (AON), which is thought to translate observed actions into motor codes required for their execution, is biologically tuned: it responds more to observation of human, than non-human, movement. This biological specificity has been taken to support the hypothesis that the AON underlies various social functions, such as...

Eye-tracking studies have demonstrated mixed support for reduced eye fixation when looking at social scenes in individuals with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC). We present evidence that these mixed findings are due to a separate condition-alexithymia-that is frequently comorbid with ASC. We find that in adults with ASC, autism symptom severity cor...

Previous studies have demonstrated that when we observe somebody else executing an action many areas of our own motor systems are active. It has been argued that these motor activations are evidence that we motorically simulate observed actions; this motoric simulation may support various functions such as imitation and action understanding. Howeve...

Despite nearly two decades of research on mirror neurons, there is still much debate about what they do. The most enduring hypothesis is that they enable ‘action understanding’. However, recent critical reviews have failed to find compelling evidence in favour of this view. Instead, these authors argue that mirror neurons are produced by associativ...

In a semi-naturalistic response-effect compatibility paradigm, participants were given the opportunity to learn that hand-shaking actions would be followed by social effects (human hand-shaking stimuli from a third-person perspective) or inanimate effects (block arrow stimuli). Relative to the actions, these effects appeared on the same or the oppo...

It has been proposed that there is a core impairment in autism spectrum conditions (ASC) to the mirror neuron system (MNS): If observed actions cannot be mapped onto the motor commands required for performance, higher order sociocognitive functions that involve understanding another person's perspective, such as theory of mind, may be impaired. How...

The associative sequence learning model proposes that the development of the mirror system depends on the same mechanisms of associative learning that mediate Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning. To test this model, two experiments used the reduction of automatic imitation through incompatible sensorimotor training to assess whether mirror syst...

Several theories of the mechanisms linking perception and action require that the links are bidirectional, but there is a lack of consensus on the effects that action has on perception. We investigated this by measuring visual event-related brain potentials to observed hand actions while participants prepared responses that were spatially compatibl...

We investigated the roles of top-down task set and bottom-up stimulus salience for feature-specific attentional capture. Spatially nonpredictive cues preceded search arrays that included a color-defined target. For target-color singleton cues, behavioral spatial cueing effects were accompanied by cue-induced N2pc components, indicative of attention...

Two experiments examined imitation of lateralised body movement sequences presented at six viewing angles (0 degrees , 60 degrees , 120 degrees , 180 degrees , 240 degrees , and 300 degrees rotation relative to the participant's body). Experiment 1 found that, when participants were instructed simply to "do what the model does", at all viewing angl...

Several models have proposed that an action can be imitated via one of two routes: a direct visuospatial route, which can in principle mediate imitation of both meaningful (MF) and meaningless (ML) actions, and an indirect semantic route, which can be used only for MF actions. The present study investigated whether selection between the direct and...

Previous research has indicated a potential discontinuity between monkey and human ventral premotor-parietal mirror systems, namely that monkey mirror systems process only transitive (object-directed) actions, whereas human mirror systems may also process intransitive (non-object-directed) actions. The present study investigated this discontinuity...

We studied how the integration of seen and felt tactile stimulation modulates somatosensory processing, and investigated whether visuotactile integration depends on temporal contiguity of stimulation, and its coherence with a preexisting body representation. During training, participants viewed a rubber hand or a rubber object that was tapped eithe...

The existence of a specialized imitation module in humans is hotly debated. Studies suggesting a specific imitation impairment in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) support a modular view. However, the voluntary imitation tasks used in these studies (which require socio-cognitive abilities in addition to imitation for successful perfo...

Recent research in cognitive neuroscience has found that observation of human actions activates the 'mirror system' and provokes automatic imitation to a greater extent than observation of non-biological movements. The present study investigated whether this human bias depends primarily on phylogenetic or ontogenetic factors by examining the effect...

We investigated whether attention shifts and eye movement preparation are mediated by shared control mechanisms, as claimed by the premotor theory of attention. ERPs were recorded in three tasks where directional cues presented at the beginning of each trial instructed participants to direct their attention to the cued side without eye movements (C...

Visual observation of human actions provokes more motor activation than observation of robotic actions. We investigated the extent to which this visuomotor priming effect is mediated by bottom-up or top-down processing. The bottom-up hypothesis suggests that robotic movements are less effective in activating the 'mirror system' via pathways from vi...

The premotor theory of attention claims that attentional shifts are triggered during response programming, regardless of which response modality is involved. To investigate this claim, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants covertly prepared a left or right response, as indicated by a precue presented at the beginnin...

The brain keeps track of the changing positions of body parts in space using a spatial body schema. When subjects localise a tactile stimulus on the skin, they might either use a somatotopic body map, or use a body schema to identify the location of the stimulation in external space. Healthy subjects were touched on the fingertips, with the hands i...

The ability to understand events that happen to other people is a characteristic feature of the human mind. Here, we investigate whether the links between mental representation of one's own body and the bodies of other people could form the basis of human social representations. We studied interpersonal body representation (IBR) in a series of beha...

Recent behavioural and neuroimaging studies have found that observation of human movement, but not of robotic movement, gives rise to visuomotor priming. This implies that the 'mirror neuron' or 'action observation-execution matching' system in the premotor and parietal cortices is entirely unresponsive to robotic movement. The present study invest...

Recent behavioural and neuroimaging studies found that observation of biological action, but not of robotic action, elicits imitation and activates the 'mirror neuron system' in the premotor cortex (Kilner, Paulignan, and Blakemore, 2003; Castiello, Lusher, Mari, Edwards, and Humphreys, 2002; Meltzoff, 1995; Tai, Scherfler, Brooks, Sawamoto, and Ca...

Perception of our own bodies is based on integration of visual and tactile inputs, notably by neurons in the brain's parietal lobes. Here we report a behavioural consequence of this integration process. Simply viewing the arm can speed up reactions to an invisible tactile stimulus on the arm. We observed this visual enhancement effect only when a t...