ArticleeLife2017
Humans treat unreliable filled-in percepts as more real than veridical ones.
Article in eLife, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Blinks are strategically coupled with head movements in unconstrained natural gaze behavior.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Filling-in of the foveal rod scotoma and confidence preference for central vision under mesopic viewing conditions.Vision research · 2026Article
- Low confidence for perceptual completion of partially occluded objects.Journal of vision · 2026Article
- Eye movements do not preferentially test inferences in the blind spot.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The similarity with a face presented in central vision improves face recognition in peripheral vision.Perception · 2025Article
- Confidence in incomplete visual search.Visual cognition · 2025Article
- Flash grab effect within the regions of modal and amodal completions.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Confidence in auditory perceptual completion.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- Infants infer and predict coherent event interactions: Modeling cognitive development.PloS one · 2024Article
- Underestimation of the number of hidden objects.Journal of vision · 2023Article
- The Eyes Have It: Psychotherapy in the Era of Masks.Journal of clinical psychology in medical settings · 2022Article
- Amodal completion and relationalism.Philosophical studies · 2022Article
- Article
- A review of interactions between peripheral and foveal vision.Journal of vision · 2020Review
- Defending subjective inflation: an inference to the best explanation.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2020Article
- Subjective inflation: phenomenology's get-rich-quick scheme.Current opinion in psychology · 2019Review
- Humans Trust Central Vision More Than Peripheral Vision Even in the Dark.Current biology : CB · 2019Article
- Inflation versus filling-in: why we feel we see more than we actually do in peripheral vision.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans often evaluate sensory signals according to their reliability for optimal decision-making. However, how do we evaluate percepts generated in the absence of direct input that are, therefore, completely unreliable? Here, we utilize the phenomenon of filling-in occurring at the physiological blind-spots to compare partially inferred and veridical percepts. Subjects chose between stimuli that elicit filling-in, and perceptually equivalent ones presented outside the blind-spots, looking for a Gabor stimulus without a small orthogonal inset. In ambiguous conditions, when the stimuli were physically identical and the inset was absent in both, subjects behaved opposite to optimal, preferring the blind-spot stimulus as the better example of a collinear stimulus, even though no relevant veridical information was available. Thus, a percept that is partially inferred is paradoxically considered more reliable than a percept based on external input. In other words: Humans treat filled-in inferred percepts as more real than veridical ones.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.