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Visual detection of time-varying signals: Opposing biases and their timescales

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  • Urit Gordon
  • Shimon Marom
  • Naama Brenner

Abstract

Human visual perception is a complex, dynamic and fluctuating process. In addition to the incoming visual stimulus, it is affected by many other factors including temporal context, both external and internal to the observer. In this study we investigate the dynamic properties of psychophysical responses to a continuous stream of visual near-threshold detection tasks. We manipulate the incoming signals to have temporal structures with various characteristic timescales. Responses of human observers to these signals are analyzed using tools that highlight their dynamical features as well. Our experiments show two opposing biases that shape perceptual decision making simultaneously: positive recency, biasing towards repeated response; and adaptation, entailing an increased probability of changed response. While both these effects have been reported in previous work, our results shed new light on the timescales involved in these effects, and on their interplay with varying inputs. We find that positive recency is a short-term bias, inversely correlated with response time, suggesting it can be compensated by afterthought. Adaptation, in contrast, reflects trends over longer times possibly including multiple previous trials. Our entire dataset, which includes different input signal temporal structures, is consistent with a simple model with the two biases characterized by a fixed parameter set. These results suggest that perceptual biases are inherent features which are not flexible to tune to input signals.

Suggested Citation

  • Urit Gordon & Shimon Marom & Naama Brenner, 2019. "Visual detection of time-varying signals: Opposing biases and their timescales," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(11), pages 1-18, November.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0224256
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0224256
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Anna-Antonia Pape & Markus Siegel, 2016. "Motor cortex activity predicts response alternation during sensorimotor decisions," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 7(1), pages 1-10, December.
    2. Ofri Raviv & Merav Ahissar & Yonatan Loewenstein, 2012. "How Recent History Affects Perception: The Normative Approach and Its Heuristic Approximation," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(10), pages 1-10, October.
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    Cited by:

    1. I. Hachen & S. Reinartz & R. Brasselet & A. Stroligo & M. E. Diamond, 2021. "Dynamics of history-dependent perceptual judgment," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 12(1), pages 1-15, December.

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