ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2025
Humans use underestimates of auditory spatial and temporal uncertainty for perceptual inference.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Distilling noise characteristics and prior expectations in multisensory causal inference.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Crossmodal interaction of flashes and beeps across time and number follows Bayesian causal inference.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Long-term perceptual priors drive confidence bias that favors prior-congruent evidence.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- 'Are you sure?' The importance of understanding your own sensory uncertainty.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Humans use underestimates of auditory spatial and temporal uncertainty for perceptual inference.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
Making decisions based on noisy sensory information is a crucial function of the brain. Various decisions take each sensory signal's uncertainty into account. Here, we investigated whether perceptual inferences rely on accurate estimates of sensory uncertainty. Participants completed a set of auditory, visual, and audiovisual spatial as well as temporal tasks. We fitted Bayesian observer models of each task to every participant's full dataset. Crucially, in some model variants, the uncertainty estimates employed for perceptual inferences were independent of the actual uncertainty associated with the sensory signals. Model comparisons and analysis of the best-fitting parameters revealed that, in unimodal and bimodal contexts, participants' perceptual decisions relied on underestimates of auditory spatial and audiovisual temporal uncertainty. These findings challenge the ubiquitous assumption that human behaviour optimally accounts for sensory uncertainty regardless of sensory domain.
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