Sensory and environmental uncertainty in perceptual decision-making

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• Biological sciences
• Neuroscience
• Sensory neuroscience