Expectations developed over multiple timescales facilitate visual search performance.

ABSTRACT: Our perception of the world is strongly influenced by our expectations, and a question of key importance is how the visual system develops and updates its expectations through interaction with the environment. We used a visual search task to investigate how expectations of different timescales (from the last few trials to hours to long-term statistics of natural scenes) interact to alter perception. We presented human observers with low-contrast white dots at 12 possible locations equally spaced on a circle, and we asked them to simultaneously identify the presence and location of the dots while manipulating their expectations by presenting stimuli at some locations more frequently than others. Our findings suggest that there are strong acuity differences between absolute target locations

SUBMITTER: Gekas N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4511121 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature