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Primates interpret conspecific behaviour as goal-directed and expect
others to achieve goals by the most efficient means possible. While this
teleological stance is prominent in evolutionary and developmental
theories of social cognition, little is known about the underlying
mechanisms. In predictive models of social cognition, a perceptual
prediction of an ideal efficient trajectory would be generated from prior
knowledge against which the observed action is evaluated, distorting the
perception of unexpected inefficient actions. To test this, participants
observed an actor reach for an object with a straight or arched trajectory
on a touch screen. The actions were made efficient or inefficient by
adding or removing an obstructing object. The action disappeared
mid-trajectory and participants touched the last seen screen position of
the hand. Judgments of inefficient actions were biased toward the
efficient prediction (straight trajectories upward to avoid the
obstruction, arched trajectories downward towards the target). These
corrections increased when the obstruction’s presence/absence was
explicitly acknowledged, and when the efficient trajectory was explicitly
predicted. Additional supplementary experiments demonstrated that these
biases occur during on-going visual perception and/or immediately after
motion offset. The teleological stance is at least partly perceptual,
providing an ideal reference trajectory against which actual behaviour is
evaluated.
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