Reinforcement of perceptual inference: reward and punishment alter conscious visual perception during binocular rivalry.

ABSTRACT: Perception is an inferential process, which becomes immediately evident when sensory information is conflicting or ambiguous and thus allows for more than one perceptual interpretation. Thinking the idea of perception as inference through to the end results in a blurring of boundaries between perception and action selection, as perceptual inference implies the construction of a percept as an active process. Here we therefore wondered whether perception shares a key characteristic of action selection, namely that it is shaped by reinforcement learning. In two behavioral experiments, we used binocular rivalry to examine whether perceptual inference can be influenced by the association of perceptual outcomes with reward or punishment, respectively, in analogy to instrumental conditioning. Bin

SUBMITTER: Wilbertz G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4253824 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature