Learning What to See in a Changing World.
Visual perception is strongly shaped by expectations, but it is poorly understood how such perceptual expectations are learned in our dynamic sensory environment. Here, we applied a Bayesian framework to investigate whether perceptual expectations are continuously updated from different aspects of ongoing experience. In two experiments, human observers performed an associative learning task in which rapidly changing expectations about the appearance of ambiguous stimuli were induced. We found that perception of ambiguous stimuli was biased by both learned associations and previous perceptual outcomes. Computational modeling revealed that perception was best explained by a model that continuously updated priors from associative learning and perceptual history and combined these priors with the current sensory information in a probabilistic manner. Our findings suggest that the construction of visual perception is a highly dynamic process that incorporates rapidly changing expectations from different sources in a manner consistent with Bayesian learning and inference.
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin Berlin, Germany.
Katharina
K
Schmack
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin Berlin, Germany.
Veith
V
Weilnhammer
Translational Neuromodelling Unit, Institute for Biomedical Engineering, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich Zurich, Switzerland.
Jakob
J
Heinzle
Translational Neuromodelling Unit, Institute for Biomedical Engineering, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich Zurich, Switzerland.
Klaas E
KE
Stephan
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité - Universitätsmedizin BerlinBerlin, Germany; Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Charité - Universitätsmedizin BerlinBerlin, Germany; Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu BerlinBerlin, Germany.
Philipp
P
Sterzer
Bayesian brain; associative learning; bistable perception; hierarchical Gaussian filter; sensory memory; visual perception