ArticleNature neuroscience2011
Cardinal rules: visual orientation perception reflects knowledge of environmental statistics.
Article in Nature neuroscience, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 304 papers.
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Who cites it
304 citing papers in PubMed.
- Serial dependence does not build up to central tendency bias in orientation judgments.Journal of vision · 2026Article
- Identifiability of Bayesian models of perception.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
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- Human gloss perception reproduced by tiny neural networks.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Stimulus reliability but not boundary distance manipulations violate the folded-X pattern of confidence.Cognition · 2026Article
- On manipulating motion gain in immersive virtual environments: An unidentified source of external noise and a new psychometric function.Journal of vision · 2026Article
- Neural circuits encode prior knowledge of temporal statistics.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Unsupervised visual learning is revealed for task-irrelevant natural scenes due to reduced attentional suppression effects in visual areas.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Hierarchical Summary Statistics Encoding Across Primary Visual and Posterior Parietal Cortices.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Distilling noise characteristics and prior expectations in multisensory causal inference.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Selective encoding of priors for flexible categorization but not Bayesian inference in the frontal eye field.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Endogenous precision of the number sense.eLife · 2026Article
- Explaining attractive and repulsive biases in the subjective visual vertical.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Reverse engineering what makes a symbol memorable.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Motion direction biases around the clock: Learned and in-built direction priors pull perception and pursuit apart.Journal of vision · 2026Article
- Sensory integration, temporal prediction, and rule discovery reflect interdependent inference processes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The Spatial Coding of Touch Is Defined in Intrinsic, Limb-Specific Coordinates: An EEG Study.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Natural scene segmentation dynamics reveal iterative Bayesian inference.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Dynamics of working memory drift and information flow across the cortical hierarchy.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Horizontal saccade bias results from combination of saliency anisotropies and egocentric biases.Scientific reports · 2026Article
244 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Humans are good at performing visual tasks, but experimental measurements have revealed substantial biases in the perception of basic visual attributes. An appealing hypothesis is that these biases arise through a process of statistical inference, in which information from noisy measurements is fused with a probabilistic model of the environment. However, such inference is optimal only if the observer's internal model matches the environment. We found this to be the case. We measured performance in an orientation-estimation task and found that orientation judgments were more accurate at cardinal (horizontal and vertical) orientations. Judgments made under conditions of uncertainty were strongly biased toward cardinal orientations. We estimated observers' internal models for orientation and found that they matched the local orientation distribution measured in photographs. In addition, we determined how a neural population could embed probabilistic information responsible for such biases.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.