Probability is known to affect perceptual estimations, but an understanding of mechanisms is lacking. Moving beyond binary classification tasks, we had naive participants report the orientation of briefly viewed gratings where we systematically manipulated contingent probability. Participants rapidly developed faster and more precise estimations for high-probability tilts. The shapes of their error distributions, as indexed by a kurtosis measure, also showed a distortion from Gaussian. This kurtosis metric was robust, capturing probability effects that were graded, contextual, and varying as a function of stimulus orientation. Our data can be understood as a probability-induced reduction in the variability or "shape" of estimation errors, as would be expected if probability affects the perceptual representations. As probability manipulations are an implicit component of many endogenous cuing paradigms, changes at the perceptual level could account for changes in performance that might have traditionally been ascribed to "attention."

Probable stimuli are more often and more quickly detected. While stimulus probability is known to affect decision-making, it can also be explained as a perceptual phenomenon. Using spatial gratings, we have previously shown that probable orientations are also more precisely estimated, even while participants remained naive to the manipulation. We conducted an electrophysiological study to investigate the effect that probability has on perception and visual-evoked potentials. In line with previous studies on oddballs and stimulus prevalence, low-probability orientations were associated with a greater late positive 'P300' component which might be related to either surprise or decision-making. However, the early 'C1' component, thought to reflect V1 processing, was dampened for high-probability orientations while later P1 and N1 components were unaffected. Exploratory analyses revealed a participant-level correlation between C1 and P300 amplitudes, suggesting a link between perceptual processing and decision-making. We discuss how these probability effects could be indicative of sharpening of neurons preferring the probable orientations, due either to perceptual learning, or to feature-based attention.

The effect of target probability on detection times is well-established: Even when detection accuracy is high, lower probability targets are detected more slowly than higher probability ones. Although this target probability effect on detection times has been well-studied, one aspect of it has remained largely unexamined: How the effect develops over the span of an experiment. Here, we investigated this issue with two detection experiments that assessed different target probability ratios. Conventional block segment analysis and linear mixed-effects modeling converged on two key findings. First, we found that the magnitude of the target probability effect increases as one progresses through a block of trials. Second, we found, by examining the trajectories of the low-and high-probability targets, that this increase in effect magnitude was driven by the lowprobability targets. Specifically, we found that lowprobability targets were detected more slowly as a block of trials progressed. Performance to high-probability targets, on the other hand, was largely invariant across the block. The latter finding is of particular interest because it cannot be reconciled with accounts that propose that the target probability effect is driven by the high-probability targets.

Frequently targets are detected faster, probable locations searched earlier, and likely orientations estimated more precisely. Are these all consequences of a single, domain-general "attentional" effect? To examine this issue, participants were shown brief instances of spatial gratings, and were tasked to draw their location and orientation. Unknown to participants, either the location or orientation probability of these gratings were manipulated. While orientation probability affected the precision of orientation reports, spatial probability did not. Further, utilising lowered stimulus contrast (via a staircase procedure) and a combination of behavioral precision and confidence self-report, we clustered trials with perceived stimuli from trials where the target was not detected: Spatial probability only modulated the likelihood of stimulus detection, but not did not modulate perceptual precision. Even when no physical attentional cues are present, acquired probabilistic information on space versus orientation leads to separable 'attention-like' effects on behaviour. We discuss how this could be linked to distinct underlying neural mechanisms. (PsycINFO Database Record

When we ask people to hold a color in working memory, what do they store? Do they remember colors as point estimates (e.g. a particular shade of red) or are memory representations richer, such as uncertainty distributions over feature space? We developed a novel paradigm (a betting game) to measure the nature of working memory representations. Participants were shown a set of colored circles and, after a brief memory delay, asked about one of the objects. Rather than reporting a single color, participants placed multiple bets to create distributions in color space. The dispersion of bets was correlated with performance, indicating that participants' internal uncertainty guided bet placement. Furthermore, relative to the first response, memory performance improved when averaging across multiple bets, showing that memories contain more information than can be conveyed in a single response. Finally, information about the item in memory was present in subsequent responses even when the first response would generally be classified as a guess or report of an incorrect item, suggesting that such failures are not all-or-none. Thus, memory representations are more than noisy point estimates; they are surprisingly rich and probabilistic.