Concurrent perception of competing predictions: a “Split-Stimulus Effect”

Abstract

Visual illusions are systematic misperceptions that can help us glean the heuristics with which the brain constructs visual experience. In a recently discovered visual illusion (the “Frame Effect”), it has been shown that flashing a stimulus inside of a moving frame produces a large misperception of that stimulus’s position. Across two experiments, we investigated a novel illusion (the “Split Stimulus Effect”) where the symmetrical motion of two overlaid frames produces two simultaneous positional misperceptions of a single stimulus. That is, one stimulus is presented but two are perceived. In both experiments, a single red dot was flashed when the moving frames reversed direction, and participants were asked to report how many dots they saw. Naïve participants sometimes reported seeing two dots when only one was presented indicating spontaneous perception of the illusion. A Bayesian analysis of the population prevalence of this effect was conducted. The dependence of this effect on the frames’ speed, the dot’s opacity, selective attention, as the presence/absence of pre-flash motion (‘postdiction’) was also investigated, and the features of this illusion were compared to similar motion position illusions within a predictive processing framework. In demonstrating this illusory “splitting” effect, this study is the first to show that it’s possible to be simultaneously aware of two opposing perceptual predictions about a single object, and provides evidence of the hyperpriors that limit and inform the structure of visual experience.