Stefan Glasauer: Modeling individual and contextual differences in magnitude perception
| When |
Apr 26, 2023
from 12:15 PM to 01:00 PM |
|---|---|
| Where | Bernstein Center, Hansastr. 9a, Lecture Hall. |
| Contact Name | Fiona Siegfried |
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Abstract
Perception of magnitudes such as distances and durations are often distorted by perceptual biases. The best known of these biases, which have been investigated since more than 150 years, is the central tendency or regression effect: small magnitudes are over-estimated and large magnitudes underestimated. Perceptual biases can vary considerably between different experiments, but also between individual participants.
In my talk, I will show how probabilistic modeling of perception can explain the perceptual biases as optimal responses to noisy sensory representations and allows to reconcile classical psychophysical views on magnitude perception. Individual differences in biases are explained by the model not just as differences in sensory noise level, but also as individual beliefs about the temporal generation of magnitude stimuli. Moreover, model simulations show and experiments confirm that the ubiquitous experimental practice of randomization can considerably increase the central tendency bias, which suggests that experimenters should reconsider whether randomization is useful in their setting.
About the speaker and his research