Evidence map›Paper›PMID 28874578›Full record

ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017

Lawful relation between perceptual bias and discriminability.

Xue-Xin Wei, Alan A Stocker

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 65 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
65citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

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.

2 · The registry

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.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

65 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Article
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  3. 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 · 2026
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  11. The tilt illusion arises from an efficient reallocation of neural coding resources at the contextual boundary.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025
    Article
  12. Article
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  14. Representational geometry explains puzzling error distributions in behavioral tasks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025
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  15. Article
  16. Article
  17. Sequential Effects in Reaching Reveal Efficient Coding in Motor Planning.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024
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  18. Article
  19. Article
  20. Article

5 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.

4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

2 authors.

Xue-Xin WeiGrossman Center for the Statistics of Mind, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027.
Alan A StockerDepartment of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104; astocker@psych.upenn.edu.ORCID 0000-0002-2041-1515

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Perception of a stimulus can be characterized by two fundamental psychophysical measures: how well the stimulus can be discriminated from similar ones (discrimination threshold) and how strongly the perceived stimulus value deviates on average from the true stimulus value (perceptual bias). We demonstrate that perceptual bias and discriminability, as functions of the stimulus value, follow a surprisingly simple mathematical relation. The relation, which is derived from a theory combining optimal encoding and decoding, is well supported by a wide range of reported psychophysical data including perceptual changes induced by contextual modulation. The large empirical support indicates that the proposed relation may represent a psychophysical law in human perception. Our results imply that the computational processes of sensory encoding and perceptual decoding are matched and optimized based on identical assumptions about the statistical structure of the sensory environment.

Indexed as

Discrimination, PsychologicalModels, TheoreticalPerceptionHumansBayesian observerefficient codingperceptual behaviorstimulus statisticsWeber–Fechner

Identifiers

PMID28874578
PMCPMC5617240

What OpenQuestion holds

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Registered trials

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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.