Transformation priming helps to disambiguate sudden changes of sensory inputs

Abstract

Retinal input is riddled with abrupt transients due to self-motion, changes in illumination, object-motion, etc. Our visual system must correctly interpret each of these changes to keep visual perception consistent and sensitive. This poses an enormous challenge, as many transients are highly ambiguous in that they are consistent with many alternative physical transformations. Here we investigated inter-trial effects in three situations with sudden and ambiguous transients, each presenting two alternative appearances (rotation-reversing structure-from-motion, polarity-reversing shape-from-shading, and streaming-bouncing object collisions). In every situation, we observed priming of transformations as the outcome perceived in earlier trials tended to repeat in subsequent trials and this repetition was contingent on perceptual experience. The observed priming was specific to transformations and did not originate in priming of perceptual states preceding a transient. Moreover, transformation priming was independent of attention and specific to low level stimulus attributes. In summary, we show how "transformation priors" and experience-driven updating of such priors helps to disambiguate sudden changes of sensory inputs. We discuss how dynamic transformation priors can be instantiated as "transition energies" in an "energy landscape" model of the visual perception.

Exogenously triggered perceptual switches in multistable structure-from-motion occur in the absence of visual awareness

“…The maximal induced destabilization was determined using the longest posttrigger interval duration (T post ¼ 320 ms; for further details, see the Results sections for Experiments 1 and 2). Please note that the effectiveness of the motion transient in inducing a perceptual reversal depends not only on its strength but also on a prior perceptual history (Pastukhov, Vivian-Griffiths, & Braun, 2015). The same procedure but using variable pretrigger intervals has been used to study the onset perception of SFM displays (Pastukhov, 2015).…”

Noise, multisensory integration, and previous response in perceptual disambiguation

“…Also, participants had a strong tendency towards interpreting the stimulus just as they did in the previous trial (Fig 2C). Such a perceptual stability over time is a classic finding in the study of ambiguous displays [13, 15, 21, 32], and it has recently been demonstrated also for the stream-bounce display [33]. This shows that perceptual disambiguation also relies on the combination of current sensory information with memory of recent perceptual interpretations [34, 35].…”

A new ‘CFS tracking’ paradigm reveals uniform suppression depth regardless of target complexity or salience

“…As an aside, the existence of distinctly different, complementary transition thresholds for bCFS and reCFS is reminiscent of the behavior termed hysteresis: a property of dynamical systems wherein output values, rather than being solely governed by corresponding input values, also exhibit lags or delays based on the valence of continuous changes in the input values. Examples of hysteresis in visual perception include transitions between binocular fusion and binocular rivalry ( Anderson, 1992 ; Buckthought et al, 2008 ; Julesz and Tyler, 1976 ), perception of motion direction in random-dot cinematograms ( Williams et al, 1986 ), and repetition priming in perception of bistable configurations ( Pastukhov et al, 2015 ). To paraphrase Maglio and Polman, 2016 , hysteresis can be construed as a form of memory whereby prior states influence the persistence of current states into the future.…”