Burcu Aysen Urgen and colleagues have published “Predictive processing in visual perception of actions: The modulation of short-term priors by the long-term prior” in Journal of Vision (July 2026).
The study asks how lifelong expectations and in-the-moment cues work together when we watch others move. Participants viewed animated human and robot agents performing biological or mechanical motion after cues about their form or motion. Long-term expectations guided decisions when the scene matched them, and when they were violated, people relied more on motion cues than on form cues. The results clarify how the brain weighs different kinds of prior knowledge when perceiving actions.
Authors: Gizem Özen, Burcu Aysen Urgen