Abstract
What has transpired immediately before has a strong influence on how sensory stimuli are processed and perceived. In particular, temporal context can have contrastive effects, repelling perception away from the interpretation of the context stimulus, and attractive effects (TCEs), whereby perception repeats upon successive presentations of the same stimulus. For decades, scientists have documented contrastive and attractive temporal context effects mostly with simple visual stimuli. But both types of effects also occur in other modalities, e.g., audition and touch, and for stimuli of varying complexity, raising the possibility that context effects reflect general computational principles of sensory systems. Neuroimaging shows that contrastive and attractive context effects arise from neural processes in different areas of the cerebral cortex, suggesting two separate operations with distinct functional roles. Bayesian models can provide a functional account of both context effects, whereby prior experience adjusts sensory systems to optimize perception of future stimuli.
Highlights
The information our senses receive is often ambiguous, incomplete, and discontinuous
Temporal context effects (TCEs) occur in other sensory modalities, such as audition and touch
Contrastive effects only occur for test stimuli that are very similar to the context, while attractive effects allow for more variability between context and test (Gepshtein and Kubovy, 2005), in line with the fact that higher brain areas show broader tuning; attractive context effects display a longer time constant than contrastive context effects (Pastukhov and Braun, 2013), mirroring neurons in higher brain areas that integrate over longer time windows (Honey et al, 2012; Chaudhuri et al, 2015)
Summary
Reviewed by: Marzia De Lucia, Laboratoire de Recherche en Neuroimagerie - LREN, Switzerland Rachel Denison, New York University, USA. AD and Melloni L (2015) How previous experience shapes perception in different sensory modalities. Scientists have documented contrastive and attractive temporal context effects mostly with simple visual stimuli. Both types of effects occur in other modalities, e.g., audition and touch, and for stimuli of varying complexity, raising the possibility that context effects reflect general computational principles of sensory systems. Neuroimaging shows that contrastive and attractive context effects arise from neural processes in different areas of the cerebral cortex, suggesting two separate operations with distinct functional roles. Bayesian models can provide a functional account of both context effects, whereby prior experience adjusts sensory systems to optimize perception of future stimuli
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have