Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2023 Aug;152(8):2177-2189. doi: 10.1037/xge0001371. Epub 2023 Mar 27.
Bayesian models of the mind suggest that we estimate the reliability or "precision" of incoming sensory signals to guide perceptual inference and to construct feelings of confidence or uncertainty about what we are perceiving. However, accurately estimating precision is likely to be challenging for bounded systems like the brain. One way observers could overcome this challenge is to form about the precision of their perceptions and use these to guide metacognition and awareness. Here we test this possibility. Participants made perceptual decisions about visual motion stimuli, while providing confidence ratings (Experiments 1 and 2) or ratings of subjective visibility (Experiment 3). In each experiment, participants acquired probabilistic expectations about the likely strength of upcoming signals. We found these expectations about precision altered metacognition and awareness-with participants feeling more confident and stimuli appearing more vivid when stronger sensory signals were expected, without concomitant changes in objective perceptual performance. Computational modeling revealed that this effect could be well explained by a predictive learning model that infers the precision (strength) of current signals as a weighted combination of incoming evidence and top-down expectation. These results support an influential but untested tenet of Bayesian models of cognition, suggesting that agents do not only "read out" the reliability of information arriving at their senses, but also take into account prior knowledge about how reliable or "precise" different sources of information are likely to be. This reveals that expectations about precision influence how the sensory world appears and how much we trust our senses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
贝叶斯思维模型表明，我们会估计输入感觉信号的可靠性或“精度”，以指导感知推断，并对我们所感知到的事物建立信心或不确定感。然而，对于像大脑这样的有限系统来说，准确估计精度可能具有挑战性。观察者克服这一挑战的一种方法是对感知精度形成估计，并利用这些估计来指导元认知和意识。在这里，我们检验了这种可能性。参与者对视觉运动刺激做出感知决策，同时提供信心评级（实验 1 和实验 2）或主观可见性评级（实验 3）。在每个实验中，参与者对即将到来的信号的可能强度形成概率性预期。我们发现，这些关于精度的预期改变了元认知和意识——当预期会出现更强的感觉信号时，参与者会感到更有信心，刺激会显得更生动，而客观感知表现没有相应变化。计算模型表明，这种效应可以很好地用一个预测学习模型来解释，该模型将当前信号的精度（强度）推断为输入证据和自上而下预期的加权组合。这些结果支持了认知贝叶斯模型中一个有影响力但未经检验的原则，即主体不仅“读取”到达其感官的信息的可靠性，还考虑到关于不同信息源的可靠性或“精度”的先验知识。这表明，对精度的预期会影响感官世界的呈现方式，以及我们对感官的信任程度。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2023 APA，保留所有权利）。
