Sensory perception is widely considered an inference process that reflects the best guess of a stimulus feature based on uncertain sensory information. Here we challenge this reductionist view and propose that perception is rather a holistic inference process that operates not only at the feature but jointly across all levels of the representational hierarchy. We test this hypothesis in the context of a commonly used psychophysical matching task in which subjects are asked to report their perceived orientation of a test stimulus by adjusting a probe stimulus (method-of-adjustment). We introduce a holistic matching model that assumes that subjects' reports reflect an optimal match between the test and probe stimulus, both in terms of their inferred feature (orientation) and also their higher level representation (orientation category). Validation against several existing data sets demonstrates that the model accurately and comprehensively predicts subjects' response behavior and outperforms previous models both qualitatively and quantitatively. Moreover, the model generalizes to other feature domains and offers an alternative account for categorical color perception. Our results suggest that categorical effects in sensory perception are ubiquitous and can be parsimoniously explained as optimal behavior based on holistic sensory representations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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感官知觉是一个整体的推理过程。


感官知觉被广泛认为是一种推理过程，反映了基于不确定的感官信息对刺激特征的最佳猜测。在这里，我们挑战这种还原论观点，并提出感知是一个整体的推理过程，它不仅在特征上运行，而且在表征层次结构的所有级别上共同运行。我们在常用的心理物理学匹配任务的背景下测试了这一假设，其中要求受试者通过调整探针刺激（调整方法）来报告他们对测试刺激的感知方向。我们引入了一个整体匹配模型，该模型假设受试者的报告反映了测试和探测刺激之间的最佳匹配，无论是在其推断的特征（方向）还是其更高级别的表示（方向类别）方面。针对多个现有数据集的验证表明，该模型准确、全面地预测了受试者的反应行为，并且在定性和定量上都优于以前的模型。此外，该模型还推广到其他特征域，并为分类颜色感知提供了另一种解释。我们的结果表明，感官知觉中的分类效应是普遍存在的，并且可以简单地解释为基于整体感官表征的最佳行为。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。