Abstract
Our perception of the world is governed by a combination of bottom-up sensory and top-down cognitive processes. This often begs the question whether a perceptual phenomenon originates from sensory or cognitive processes in the brain. For instance, reference repulsion, a compelling visual illusion in which the subjective estimates about the direction of a motion stimulus are biased away from a reference boundary, is previously thought to be originated at the sensory level. Recent studies, however, suggest that the misperception is not sensory in nature but rather reflects post-perceptual cognitive biases. Here I challenge the post-perceptual interpretations on both empirical and conceptual grounds. I argue that these new findings are not incompatible with the sensory account and can be more parsimoniously explained as reflecting the consequences of motion representations in different reference frames. Finally, I will propose one concrete experiment with testable predictions to shed more insights on the sensory vs. cognitive nature of this visual illusion.
Highlights
A long-standing question in perception and cognitive science is to address how our perception of the world is driven by a division of labor between bottom-up sensory processes and topdown cognitive factors
Perception of motion is one important aspect of human vision, and one compelling visual illusion during motion perception is the so-called reference repulsion – a systematic bias away from a static reference line when estimating the direction of a cloud of moving random-dot stimuli (Rauber and Treue, 1998)
It is previously suggested that reference repulsion is sensory in nature, reflecting the consequence of the decoding strategy optimized for direction discrimination around the reference boundary (Jazayeri and Movshon, 2007)
Summary
This sensory view, is contradicted by recent findings arguing that reference repulsion is not a sensory process but rather reflects late, post-perceptual cognitive biases (Zamboni et al, 2016; Fritsche and de Lange, 2019). To disentangle the sensory vs decision-related cognitive accounts, the authors manipulated the timing and orientation of the reference line during the estimation phase (while keep the early sensory stimulus unchanged) in two separate experiments.
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