The influence of explicit conceptual knowledge on perception of physical motions: An ERP study

Event-related potential is used to study the influence of explicit conceptual knowledge on the perception of physical motions. Participants holding correct or wrong physics concept performed an oddball task with a pair of stimuli. For half of the blocks, the motion consistent with the physical law was the oddball stimulus and the motion inconsistent with the physical law was the standard stimulus and vice versa. The participants holding correct conceptual knowledge showed the larger parietal P3 to the incorrect target stimulus. By contrast, the participants holding wrong conceptual knowledge showed the larger parietal P3 to the correct target stimulus. The results suggest that explicit conceptual knowledge could affect the perception of physical motions. People tend to bias their perception toward the existing explicit knowledge. This study could be helpful for understanding the contribution of education to human perception.