Lawful relation between perceptual bias and discriminability
Abstract
We present a law of human perception. The law expresses a mathematical relation between our ability to perceptually discriminate a stimulus from similar ones and our bias in the perceived stimulus value. We derived the relation based on theoretical assumptions about how the brain represents sensory information and how it interprets this information to create a percept. Our main assumption is that both encoding and decoding are optimized for the specific statistical structure of the sensory environment. We found large experimental support for the law in the literature, which includes biases and changes in discriminability induced by contextual modulation (e.g., adaptation). Our results imply that human perception generally relies on statistically optimized processes.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Sep 05, 2017
- Source ID
- 10.1073/pnas.1619153114
Entities
People
- Alan A. Stocker
- Xue-xin Wei
Organizations
- Columbia University
- Office of Naval Research Global
- University of Pennsylvania