Seeing what you want to see: priors for one's own actions represent exaggerated expectations of success

Abstract

People perceive the consequences of their own actions differently to how they perceive other sensory events. A large body of psychology research has shown that people also consistently overrate their own performance relative to others, yet little is known about how these “illusions of superiority” are normally maintained. Here we examined the visual perception of the sensory consequences of self-generated and observed goal-directed actions. Across a series of visuomotor tasks, we found that the perception of the sensory consequences of one's own actions is more biased toward success relative to the perception of observed actions. Using Bayesian models, we show that this bias could be explained by priors that represent exaggerated predictions of success. The degree of exaggeration of priors was unaffected by learning, but was correlated with individual differences in trait optimism. In contrast, when observing these actions, priors represented more accurate predictions of the actual performance. The results suggest that the brain internally represents optimistic predictions for one's own actions. Such exaggerated predictions bind the sensory consequences of our own actions with our intended goal, explaining how it is that when acting we tend to see what we want to see.

The neuroanatomical and neurochemical basis of apathy and impulsivity in frontotemporal lobar degeneration

“…Dysfunction of the latter circuit in FTLD can cause the failure to self-generate motor patterns, over and above blunted affect or cognitive dysfunction, in keeping with evidence for this circuit in voluntary action selection in health [20,28] and poor signal-to-noise in motor plans arising from the medial frontal cortex [29]. This ‘auto-activation’ deficit can also be formulated as a failure to reach a necessary activation threshold, by leakage, decay or refractoriness in the fronto-parietal neuronal ensembles that represent actions [17].…”

Apathy is Associated with Reduced Precision of Prior Beliefs about Action Outcomes

“…To infer the precision of prior beliefs in the perception of action outcomes, we examined participants' estimates of their own performance as follows. For each estimation trial, we assumed that the prior and sensory evidence are Gaussian, such that the optimal estimate of the ball's final position can be derived from Bayes' rule (Wolpe et al, 2014):…”

“…( 3) where the slope of a linear regression of estimation error by performance error characterises the weighting term (Wolpe et al, 2014). A slope of -1 corresponds to full reliance on priors relative to sensory evidence, whereas a slope of 0 corresponds to a disregard of priors relative to sensory evidence.…”

“…The precision of prior beliefs can be inferred through computational modelling of behavioural data (e.g. Wolpe, Wolpert, & Rowe, 2014). This can be used to test the mechanism of individual differences in apathy, in healthy adults and clinical populations, and in relation to clinical outcomes and neural data (Adams, Huys, & Roiser, 2015).…”

“…This can be used to test the mechanism of individual differences in apathy, in healthy adults and clinical populations, and in relation to clinical outcomes and neural data (Adams, Huys, & Roiser, 2015). In the context of visuomotor tasks, we previously found that the precision of priors was associated with trait optimism, such that more optimistic individuals tended to have more precise priors, leading to a perceptual distortion towards better performance (Wolpe et al, 2014). Evidence from Parkinson's disease suggests that the precision of priors is related to dopamine .…”