Topic: perceptual uncertainty

Neural activity in visual cortex is well described by models composed of a deterministic tuning function, a stochastic gain, and a point process. Recent work has shown that in the responses of neurons in the visual cortex of nonhuman primates, variability in the gain is tuned to the statistics of the sensory input. This suggests that gain variability may reflect signal rather than noise. Some theories of neural coding suggest that perceptual uncertainty may be encoded in neural response variability, and that, specifically, gain variability appears well suited to inform downstream uncertainty e

Perceptual decision making is fraught with uncertainty that comes (at least) in two distinct forms: there can be uncertainty about how a stimulus is perceived, and even for a known stimulus there can be uncertainty about the decision that it licenses. Although putative neural correlates of uncertainty have been described in early sensory areas, these two forms of uncertainty have not been distinguished. Thus, it remains unknown whether and how perceptual uncertainty (presumably computed locally), as opposed to decision uncertainty (presumably computed downstream and conveyed by feedback connec

The predictive processing framework conceptualizes perception as co-constructed by sensory information and priors. These priors arise from different sources including long-term and short-term perceptual history. According to predictive processing, psychosis can be explained as a reduced weighting of priors relative to sensory information. This study investigated how short-term priors from different sources are used in perceptual decision-making and how psychosis proneness (PP) modulates the use of these priors.Across two online experiments, 101 healthy participants completed an auditory percep