Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 114, Issue 38, Pages 10244-10249Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1619153114
Keywords
perceptual behavior; efficient coding; Bayesian observer; Weber-Fechner; stimulus statistics
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Funding
- Office of Naval Research [N000141110744]
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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.
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