Postdiction: its implications on visual awareness, hindsight, and sense of agency

Abstract

There are a few postdictive perceptual phenomena known, in which a stimulus presented later seems causally to affect the percept of another stimulus presented earlier. While backward masking provides a classical example, the flash lag effect stimulates theorists with a variety of intriguing findings. The TMS-triggered scotoma together with “backward filling-in” of it offer a unique neuroscientific case. Findings suggest that various visual attributes are reorganized in a postdictive fashion to be consistent with each other, or to be consistent in a causality framework. In terms of the underlying mechanisms, four prototypical models have been considered: the “catch up,” the “reentry,” the “different pathway” and the “memory revision” models. By extending the list of postdictive phenomena to memory, sensory-motor and higher-level cognition, one may note that such a postdictive reconstruction may be a general principle of neural computation, ranging from milliseconds to months in a time scale, from local neuronal interactions to long-range connectivity, in the complex brain. The operational definition of the “postdictive phenomenon” can be applicable to such a wide range of sensory/cognitive effects across a wide range of time scale, even though the underlying neural mechanisms may vary across them. This has significant implications in interpreting “free will” and “sense of agency” in functional, psychophysical and neuroscientific terms.

Time-compressed preplay of anticipated events in human primary visual cortex

“…13). This is in line with the proposal that illusory motion can be understood as a post-dictive perceptual phenomenon1718, in which the motion percept along the apparent motion trajectory is constructed after the stimuli have been presented. It has been further reported that perception of illusory motion is abolished when the fixation point falls on the apparent motion path, potentially because of the less precise representation of stimuli in the periphery.…”

Visualising mental representations: A primer on noise-based reverse correlation in social psychology

“…In particular, these models describe how top-down predictions or inferences are matched to incoming sensory inputs across different levels of the cortical hierarchy. Different levels of the cortical hierarchy represent different levels of abstraction at which predictions and inferences are instantiated: Lower levels implement, for example, the continuation of regular spatial patterns behind occlusions or in the blind spot of our retina (Komatsu, 2006;Shimojo, 2014), whereas higher levels implement how we mentally represent others and their expected behaviour (Koster-Hale & Saxe, 2013). When there is a mismatch between the predicted and the received sensory inputs, a prediction-error signal is fed forward up the cortical hierarchy, which in turn evokes new or updated inferences that better match the sensory inputs.…”

Temporal binding of interval markers

“…Similar arguments have been raised in the context of simultaneity illusions, where it has been claimed that marker correspondence and not neural processing latencies determines temporal binding of visual attributes9. This view rejects the idea that event time is inferred from brain time and instead suggests a postdictive estimation of time1011.…”