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Abstract
Stimulus statistics can induce expectations that in turn can influence multisensory perception. In three experiments, we manipulate perceptual history by biasing stimulus statistics and examined the effect of implicit expectations on the perceptual resolution of a bistable visual stimulus that is modulated by sound. First, we found a general effect of expectation such that responses were biased in line with the biased statistics and interpret this as a bias towards an implicitly expected outcome. Second, expectation did not influence the perception of all types of stimuli. In both Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, integrated audio-visual stimuli were affected by expectation but visual-only and unintegrated audio-visual stimuli were not. In Experiment 3 we examined the sensory versus interpretational effects of expectation and found that contrary to our predictions, an expectation of audio-visually integrated stimuli was associated with impaired multisensory integration compared to visual-only or unintegrated audio-visual stimuli. Our findings suggest that perceptual experience implicitly creates expectations that influence multisensory perception, which appear to be about perceptual outcomes rather than sensory stimuli. Finally, in the case of resolving perceptual ambiguity, the expectation effect is an effect on cognitive rather than sensory processes.
Highlights
IntroductionThe mechanisms underlying perceptual disambiguation are a central topic in sensory neuroscience (Parise & Ernst, 2017), and a common view is that, rather than being passively stimulus driven, perception is an active inferential process (Wang et al, 2013)
Our aim is to test if perceptual experience, in the form of biased stimulus statistics, creates an implicit expectation that modulates the resolution of ambiguity in visual-only and audiovisual perception
We first report a significant main effect of expectation (F(1,29) = 5.13, p = 0.031, ηp2 = 0.150) whereby the percentage of bounce responses was significantly higher for high bounce expectation targets (M = 57%, SE = 3%) compared to low bounce expectation targets (M = 54%, SE = 4%)
Summary
The mechanisms underlying perceptual disambiguation are a central topic in sensory neuroscience (Parise & Ernst, 2017), and a common view is that, rather than being passively stimulus driven, perception is an active inferential process (Wang et al, 2013). Sensory input provides the brain with information that reflects the current state of the world, and prior knowledge, gained through experience, provides the brain with information about how the world works (e.g., Gekas et al, 2015; Gilbert & Sigman, 2007; Kersten et al, 2004; Kornmeier et al, 2009; Maloney et al, 2005; Summerfield & Egner, 2009; Wang et al, 2013). While the sensory input reflects the state of the world, it always underspecifies it; sensory information is varyingly noisy, incomplete, and weak, and so in general, it is ambiguous (Parise & Ernst, 2018; Urgen & Boyaci, 2021; Zeljko et al, 2019). Prior knowledge in the form of learned associations have been shown to bias perceptual decisions regarding ambiguous stimuli (Einhäuser et al, 2017), priming (e.g., Bugelski & Alampay, 1961; Intaitė et al, 2013; Ouhnana & Kingdom, 2016), and serial dependence (e.g., Brascamp et al, 2010; Pearson & Brascamp, 2008; Zeljko & Grove, 2021)
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