Schedule of Events | Symposia

Behavioral correlates of sensory and choice information tuning with (un)confirmed expectations

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Gabriela Iwama^1,2,3 (gabriela.iwama@uni-tuebingen.de), Randolph Helfrich^2,3,4; ¹University of Tübingen, ²International Max Planck Research School for the Mechanisms of Mental Function and Dysfunction, ³Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research, ⁴University Hospital Tübingen

Prior expectations play a critical role in how we perceive and interpret the world. To guide adaptive behavior in dynamic environments, these expectations must flexibly integrate with perceptual decisions. Despite extensive evidence that expectations impact perception, the neural mechanisms behind this remain unclear. Does the brain enhance expected visual information or emphasize unexpected information? In this study, we developed a behavioral task that combines reversal learning with a motion discrimination challenge. This approach allowed us to disentangle the formation of prior expectations and how they influence visual decisions. We estimated participants' prior beliefs using behavioral modeling and examined neural activity patterns to decode sensory and choice information. Our findings reveal that stronger priors enhance the generalizability of pre-stimulus sensory information, even when expectations are not confirmed. Furthermore, we observed no statistical differences in the decoding of expected and unexpected sensory information, but a consistent dampening of expected choice information across subjects. Most notably, we observed a correlation between choice dampening and confirmation bias in accuracy and reaction time and a correlation between sensory tuning and speed-accuracy trade-offs. These results support perceptual prediction theories, including the opposing process theory, and highlight how priors dynamically shape neural representations depending on their strength and validity.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Vision