Conflicts between short- and long-term experiences affect visual perception through modulating sensory or motor response systems: Evidence from Bayesian inference models

Cognition. 2024 Mar 12;246:105768. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105768. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTThe independent effects of short- and long-term experiences on visual perception have been discussed for decades. However, no study has investigated whether and how these experiences simultaneously affect our visual perception. To address this question, we asked participants to estimate their self-motion directions (i.e., headings) simulated from optic flow, in which a long-term experience learned in everyday life (i.e., straight-forward motion being more common than lateral motion) plays an important role. The headings were selected from three distributions that resembled a peak, a hill, and a flat line, creating different short-term experiences. Importantly, the proportions of headings deviating from the straight-forward motion gradually increased in the peak, hill, and flat distributions, leading to a greater conflict between long- and short-term experiences. The results showed that participants biased their heading estimates towards the straight-ahead direction and previously seen headings, which increased with the growing experience conflict. This suggests that both long- and short-term experiences simultaneously affect visual perception. Finally, we developed two Bayesian models (Model 1 vs. Model 2) based on two assumptions that the experience conflict altered the likelihood distribution of sensory representation or the motor response system. The results showed that b...

Source: Cognition - March 13, 2024 Category: Neurology Authors: Qi Sun Jing-Yi Wang Xiu-Mei Gong Source Type: research