Hong Fangfang, Xu Jiaming, Landy Michael S, Badde Stephanie
Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.
Proc Biol Sci. 2025 Jun;292(2048):20242880. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2024.2880. Epub 2025 Jun 4.
Making decisions based on noisy sensory information is a crucial function of the brain. Various decisions take each sensory signal's uncertainty into account. Here, we investigated whether perceptual inferences rely on accurate estimates of sensory uncertainty. Participants completed a set of auditory, visual, and audiovisual spatial as well as temporal tasks. We fitted Bayesian observer models of each task to every participant's full dataset. Crucially, in some model variants, the uncertainty estimates employed for perceptual inferences were independent of the actual uncertainty associated with the sensory signals. Model comparisons and analysis of the best-fitting parameters revealed that, in unimodal and bimodal contexts, participants' perceptual decisions relied on underestimates of auditory spatial and audiovisual temporal uncertainty. These findings challenge the ubiquitous assumption that human behaviour optimally accounts for sensory uncertainty regardless of sensory domain.
基于有噪声的感官信息做出决策是大脑的一项关键功能。各种决策都会考虑每个感官信号的不确定性。在此，我们研究了知觉推理是否依赖于对感官不确定性的准确估计。参与者完成了一系列听觉、视觉、视听空间以及时间任务。我们将每个任务的贝叶斯观察者模型拟合到每个参与者的完整数据集。至关重要的是，在一些模型变体中，用于知觉推理的不确定性估计与与感官信号相关的实际不确定性无关。模型比较和对最佳拟合参数的分析表明，在单峰和双峰情境中，参与者的知觉决策依赖于对听觉空间和视听时间不确定性的低估。这些发现挑战了普遍存在的假设，即无论感官领域如何，人类行为都能最佳地考虑感官不确定性。
