2019 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience

13-16 September 2019    Berlin, Germany

Technical Program

Paper Detail

Paper: PS-1A.24
Session: Poster Session 1A
Location: H Lichthof
Session Time: Saturday, September 14, 16:30 - 19:30
Presentation Time:Saturday, September 14, 16:30 - 19:30
Presentation: Poster
Publication: 2019 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience, 13-16 September 2019, Berlin, Germany
Paper Title: Using the perceptual confirmation-bias to study learning and feedback in fovea and periphery
Manuscript:  Click here to view manuscript
License: Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.32470/CCN.2019.1396-0
Authors: Ankani Chattoraj, Richard Lange, Ralf Haefner, University of Rochester, United States
Abstract: When temporally integrating information, humans are often, but not always, biased to overweigh early evidence (``primacy effect''). We recently showed how these observations could be explained by assuming that the brain performs approximate inference in a hierarchical model in which expectations influence sensory inferences. Here, we use this framework to ask two related questions: (1) Does perceptual decision-making adapt to the rate at which new visual information is presented, or is its assumption fixed, learnt over long times? (2) Does the strength of feedback differ near the fovea compared to larger eccentricities, as in a recently proposed hypothesis? In a first experiment, we compared the strength of the perceptual primacy effect in two conditions which only differed in the duration for which each stimulus frame was presented. We found that the primacy effect differed when measured in physical time, but stayed the same in ``frame-time'', indicating that the brain had adapted to the rate at which it received independent information. Second, we compared the strength of the primacy effect near the fovea and in the periphery, and did not find a significant difference, suggesting an equal strength of feedback near the fovea and in the near periphery.