how recent history affects perception the normative approach and its heuristic approximation近代史如何影响知觉的规范方法和启发式近似.pdfVIP

How Recent History Affects Perception: The Normative Approach and Its Heuristic Approximation 1 1,2 1,3 Ofri Raviv *, Merav Ahissar , Yonatan Loewenstein 1The Edmond Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, 2 Departments of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, 3 Departments of Neurobiology and Cognitive Sciences and the Center for the Study of Rationality, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel Abstract There is accumulating evidence that prior knowledge about expectations plays an important role in perception. The Bayesian framework is the standard computational approach to explain how prior knowledge about the distribution of expected stimuli is incorporated with noisy observations in order to improve performance. However, it is unclear what information about the prior distribution is acquired by the perceptual system over short periods of time and how this information is utilized in the process of perceptual decision making. Here we address this question using a simple two-tone discrimination task. We find that the ‘‘contraction bias’’, in which small magnitudes are overestimated and large magnitudes are underestimated, dominates the pattern of responses of human participants. This contraction bias is consistent with the Bayesian hypothesis in which the true prior information is available to the decision-maker. However, a trial-by-trial analysis of the pattern of responses reveals that the contribution of most recent trials to performance is overweighted compared with the predictions of a standard Bayesian model. Moreover, we study participants’ performance in a-typical distributions of stimuli and demo