title: Can I trust in what I see? EEG evidence for a cognitive evaluation of perceptual constructs.
abstract: Environmental information available to our senses is incomplete and to varying degrees ambiguous. It has to be disambiguated in order to construct stable and reliable percepts. Ambiguous figures are artificial examples where perception is maximally unstable and alternates between possible interpretations. Tiny low-level changes can disambiguate an ambiguous figure and thus stabilize percepts. The present study compares ERPs evoked by ambiguous stimuli and disambiguated stimulus variants across three visual categories: geometry (Necker cube), motion (stroboscopic alternative motion stimulus, SAM) and semantics (Boring's old/young woman). We found that (a) disambiguated stimulus variants cause stable percepts and evoke two huge positive ERP excursions (Cohen's effect sizes 1-2), (b) the amplitudes of these ERP effects are inversely related to the degree of stimulus ambiguity, and (c) this pattern of results is consistent across all three tested visual categories. This generality across visual categories points to mechanisms at a very abstract (cognitive) level of processing. We discuss our results in the context of a high-level Bayesian inference unit that evaluates the reliability of perceptual processing results, given a priori incomplete, ambiguous sensory information. The ERP components may reflect the outcome of this reliability estimation.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health, Freiburg, Germany. juergen.kornmeier@uni-freiburg.de.|Eye Center, Medical Center, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany. juergen.kornmeier@uni-freiburg.de.|Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Medical Center, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany. juergen.kornmeier@uni-freiburg.de.|Faculty of Medicine, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany. juergen.kornmeier@uni-freiburg.de.
authors.forename: Jürgen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kornmeier
authors.affiliation: Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health, Freiburg, Germany.|Eye Center, Medical Center, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany.|Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Medical Center, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany.|Faculty of Medicine, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Rike
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Wörner
authors.affiliation: Eye Center, Medical Center, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany.|Faculty of Medicine, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bach
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D009903:Optical Illusions / Q000502:physiology; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011601:Psychophysics; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Ambiguous figures, Necker cube, Multistable perception, EEG, ERPs, Bayesian inference