Sensory and environmental uncertainty in perceptual decision-making
Merve Fritsch,
Veith Weilnhammer,
Paul Thiele,
Andreas Heinz,
Philipp Sterzer
Affiliations
Merve Fritsch
Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences (CCM), Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, 10117 Berlin, Germany; Corresponding author
Veith Weilnhammer
Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences (CCM), Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, 10117 Berlin, Germany; Berlin Institute of Health, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin und Max Delbrück Center, 10178 Berlin, Germany
Paul Thiele
Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences (CCM), Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, 10117 Berlin, Germany
Andreas Heinz
Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences (CCM), Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, 10117 Berlin, Germany
Philipp Sterzer
Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences (CCM), Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, 10117 Berlin, Germany; Berlin Institute of Health, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin und Max Delbrück Center, 10178 Berlin, Germany; Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, 10117 Berlin, Germany; Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 10099 Berlin, Germany; University of Basel, Department of Psychiatry (UPK), Wilhelm-Klein-Strasse 27, 4002 Basel, Switzerland
Summary: In perceptual decision-making, uncertainties regarding both noisy sensory information and changing environmental regularities must be considered. We aimed to clarify the relationship between these two sources of uncertainty using a combined motion discrimination and audiovisual reversal learning task with Bayesian modeling. As predicted, the influence of learned beliefs regarding audiovisual associations on perceptual decisions was greater under high sensory uncertainty. Critically, this modulatory effect was larger under high than low environmental uncertainty. Moreover, the degree to which observers relied on learned beliefs when making perceptual decisions depended on their individual tendency to change beliefs. While these findings suggest that weighting of the available sensory information against learned beliefs is modulated by their respective uncertainties, belief learning was not found to rely on sensory uncertainty. Unraveling of these interactive effects of sensory and environmental uncertainties in perception might aid in the understanding of aberrant perceptual inference in psychopathology such as schizophrenia.
