Projecting Other People or “someone” in the Brain onto the Environment

Abstract

 We cannot ignore the presence of others in our society. Previous studies have suggested that humans are inclined to feel “the presence” of other people, even when other people do not actually exist. In this review paper, we raise some examples in which various performances of participants were altered by the belief in the presence of others or by mirror-reflections of selves, even if no one do not actually exist. We discuss these mental processes in terms of “projections,” referring to the cognitive processes of projecting someone’s mental representation of events or others onto the real (external) world. The first set of studies demonstrates that other people existing only in our brains could be projected onto the real world without real people existing (fictional projection), such as “the third-man” phenomenon and imaginary companions. The second set illustrates that people sometimes “see” objects or others in the real world with different representations (i.e., misprojection). For instance, children often project imaginary characters onto the real people (e.g., pretended play), and people interact with artificial objects by personification. Furthermore, we have newly demonstrated that the misprojection of other people could “socially” influence individuals’ psychological,physiological, and behavioral states. Our studies show that an imaginary competitor could change the amplitude of the event-related potential P300 and encourage high engagement states as with a real competitor when playing video games. Another series of studies shows that visual information of “someone” is sufficient to produce the “social”facilitation of eating.