Flexible mechanisms underlie the evaluation of visual confidence.

ABSTRACT: Visual processing is fraught with uncertainty: The visual system must attempt to estimate physical properties despite missing information and noisy mechanisms. Sometimes high visual uncertainty translates into lack of confidence in our visual perception: We are aware of not seeing well. The mechanism by which we achieve this awareness--how we assess our own visual uncertainty--is unknown, but its investigation is critical to our understanding of visual decision mechanisms. The simplest possibility is that the visual system relies on cues to uncertainty, stimulus features usually associated with visual uncertainty, like blurriness. Probabilistic models of the brain suggest a more sophisticated mechanism, in which visual uncertainty is explicitly represented as probability distributions. In

SUBMITTER: Barthelme S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2996459 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature