December 2022
Volume 22, Issue 14
Open Access
Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting Abstract  |   December 2022
The mystery of what probabilistic perception means and why we should focus on the complexity of the internal representations instead
Author Affiliations
  • Dobromir Rahnev
    School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Journal of Vision December 2022, Vol.22, 3170. doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.14.3170
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      Dobromir Rahnev; The mystery of what probabilistic perception means and why we should focus on the complexity of the internal representations instead. Journal of Vision 2022;22(14):3170. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.14.3170.

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      © ARVO (1962-2015); The Authors (2016-present)

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Abstract

Two years ago, I joined an adversarial collaboration on whether perception is probabilistic. The idea was to quickly agree on a precise definition of the term “probabilistic perception” and then focus on designing experiments that can reveal if it exists. Two years later, we are still debating the definition of the term, and I now believe that it cannot be defined. Why the pessimism? At the heart of probabilistic perception is the idea that the brain represents information as probability distributions. Probability distributions, however, are mathematical objects derived from set theory that do not easily apply to the brain. In practice, probabilistic perception is typically equated with “having a representation of uncertainty.” This phrase ultimately seems to mean “having a representation of any information beyond a point estimate.” Defined this way, the claim that perception is probabilistic borders on the trivial, and the connection to the notion of probability distributions appears remote. I no longer think that there is a way forward. Indeed, in empirical work, the term probabilistic perception seems to serve as a litmus test of how researchers feel about Bayesian theories of the brain rather than a precise hypothesis about the brain itself. What then? I argue that the question that is both well-posed and empirically tractable is "How complex is the perceptual representation?” I will briefly review what we know about this question and present recent work from my lab suggesting that perceptual representations available for decision-making are simple and impoverished.

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