The influence of prior experience and symbolic cueing on human path integration
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1
Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, Institute for Clinical Neurosciences, Germany
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2
Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Munich, Germany
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3
Ludwig-Maximilians University, Integrated Research and Treatment Center for Vertigo, Germany
Perception and action are the result of an integration of various sources of information, such as current sensory input, prior experience, or the context in which a stimulus occurs. As we have shown, human visual path integration behavior in a simple homing task can be described as the optimized result of a probabilistic combination of the current sensory input and short-term prior experience gathered over the preceding trials (Petzschner and Glasauer, J Neurosci 31, 2011). The observed trial-to-trial modifications in performance are explained by a rapidly adapting prior that does not depend on error feedback.
Here, we investigate whether additional information given by symbolic verbal cues can influence the path integration behavior and how the observed results can be explained by probabilistic modelling. Thus we extended the mentioned distance production-reproduction task to include a symbolic cue that supplied additional, but initially uncertain information about the stimulus value. The symbolic cue values were provided as a written instruction prior to each trial and indicated whether the distance to be reproduced would be ‘short’ or ‘long’. The cue values corresponded to two ranges of distances. We investigated whether (1) subjects could use such a symbolic cue that provided reliable but imprecise information about the sample distances and (2) how this abstract information influenced their estimation process. To evaluate the behavioral results in the cue condition we used two control conditions that mimicked the extreme cases of cue usage. In the first control condition, we presented participants with exactly the same distances in the same order, but without the symbolic cue. In the second control condition the ‘short’ and ‘long’ ranges of displacements were presented in a separate order. Thus, if subjects ignored the symbolic cue, we expected that the performance in the cue condition would resemble that of the first control condition. If subjects however separated their estimates based on the symbolic cue, the behavior should be similar to the second control condition.
Our results show that subjects are able to utilize the additional symbolic information given in the ’cued’ condition to modify their estimate of self-displacement. To explain these effects, we propose two models of distance estimation by iterative Bayesian inference, the categorical and the cue-combination model, which are founded on qualitatively different assumptions about the causal relationship between the sensory stimulus and the symbolic cue and consequently, about how the mapping of the symbolic cue to the stimulus dimension is learned during the experiment. Both models combine 1) the current noisy sensory input, 2) a prior expectation of the presented distance adaptively adjusted with each trials, and 3) the information provided by the discrete symbolic cue into a single estimate of displacement and perform equally well for the observed behavior.
We conclude that the probabilistic modelling approach to understanding ‘cognitive’ influence, such as prior experience or symbolic cues, on action production can lead to simple but powerful models, which can explain a range of previous psychophysical findings.
Acknowledgements
Supported by the BMBF (grants IFB 01EO0901 and BCCN 01GQ0440)
References
Petzschner, F.H., and Glasauer, S. (2011). Iterative Bayesian Estimation as an Explanation for Range and Regression Effects: A Study on Human Path Integration. J. Neurosci. 31, 17220-17229.
Keywords:
Categorization,
Cue Combination,
Experience-dependent prior,
Iterative Bayes,
Magnitude Reproduction,
Multi-Modal,
path integration,
Pre-Cueing
Conference:
Bernstein Conference 2012, Munich, Germany, 12 Sep - 14 Sep, 2012.
Presentation Type:
Poster
Topic:
Sensory processing and perception
Citation:
Petzschner
F,
Maier
P and
Glasauer
S
(2012). The influence of prior experience and symbolic cueing on human path integration.
Front. Comput. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
Bernstein Conference 2012.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fncom.2012.55.00205
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Received:
11 May 2012;
Published Online:
12 Sep 2012.
*
Correspondence:
Mrs. Frederike Petzschner, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, Institute for Clinical Neurosciences, Munich, Germany, petzschner@biomed.ee.ethz.ch