How our expectations change what we feel and see

What is it about?

This study explores how our expectations influence what we feel and see. We asked participants to predict how painful or visually intense an upcoming stimulus would be based on cues that they believed were ratings from 10 previous participants. In fact, these cues were designed to manipulate expectations in specific ways, systematically varying their average and variance across previous “participants”, and the presence of outlier ratings. The results showed that people’s actual experience of pain and visual contrast shifted toward what they expected. Interestingly, people paid extra attention to extreme values, especially lower pain ratings, and this influenced their expectations. Brain scans revealed that the cues affected brain responses to painful and visual stimuli in brain areas linked to emotional and cognitive processing, but not brain areas that process early sensory input. This suggests that expectations don’t change early perceptual processing, but rather how we interpret and react to those sensations.

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Why is it important?

This research helps explain how our minds use cues to shape our sensory experiences, a process that plays a key role in perception. It offers new insight into how expectations are formed and how they can alter what we actually feel—even without any change in the physical stimulus. What's unique about this study is its careful testing of how people build expectations from complex information and how that affects both behavior and brain activity. These findings are timely for understanding placebo effects, improving pain treatments, and refining predictive processing models of perception. They also challenge current theories by showing that these effects differ across senses and are stronger in higher-level brain systems than in early sensory areas.