A recent study explored how paranoia (believing others intend harm) and teleological thinking (ascribing too much purpose to unintentional events)—two distinct cognitive tendencies—affect social perception through visual processing. Using motion-based animacy detection tasks, the researchers identified patterns of “social hallucinations” tied to high-confidence perceptual errors and offered insights into the perceptual mechanisms underlying these cognitive phenomena.

“Social impressions arise from low-level visual primitives, such as relative distance, facingness, contingency, and asymmetrical relatedness,” the investigators described in their Communications Psychology article. Corresponding neural data also comprise a “pathway dedicated to rapid social information processing", and paranoia and teleology can result when Theory-of-Mind—or attribution of intention—goes awry.

The study included 623 participants across four studies and had diverse demographic and cognitive profiles, with varying levels of paranoia and teleological thinking that were assessed using validated psychometric tools.

Animacy detection tasks featured motion displays where participants identified whether a disc (“wolf”) was chasing another (“sheep”). Conditions included “chase-present” and “chase-absent” scenarios to test participants' sensitivity and response biases.

Individuals with high paranoia or teleological thinking were more likely to perceive chasing when none was present (false alarms). These tendencies reflected a predisposition toward high-confidence perceptual errors or social hallucinations, as the researchers described. Participants with high paranoia also struggled to correctly identify the "sheep" in chase-present trials, while those with high teleology misidentified the “wolf”. “This pattern suggests that the relationship between perception and thought identified here may not be a simple matter of aberrant reasoning leading to a general improvement or impairment; rather, different kinds of aberrant thought about intentions may be associated with strikingly specific forms of social perception,” the researchers wrote.

Both groups exhibited heightened confidence in their misattributions during chase-absent trials. 

“Neural activation in visual areas associated with social perception, such as the extrastriate body area, temporoparietal junction, and posterior superior temporal sulcus, supports the perceptual nature of these displays,” the investigators wrote. However, the question of whether bottom-up visual perception informs higher cognition or vice versa, needs further exploration. The investigators suggested that future studies localize perception deficits to individual psychotic symptoms, though they noted that individuals with schizophrenia may have difficulty identifying what is being chased vs. what is chasing in similar studies.

Further, because paranoia and other delusions may have different underlying cognitive and perceptual mechanisms, visual tests such as these may point treating clinicians toward interventions that would be most helpful for individual patients.

“In the broadest sense,” the researchers concluded, the findings of this study “suggest new links between seeing and thinking—with aberrant thought about the social world being connected to aberrant social perception, in ways not previously appreciated.”

A full list of author disclosures can be found in the published research