Reinforcement of perceptual inference: reward and punishment alter conscious visual perception during binocular rivalry

Abstract

Perception is an inferential process, which becomes immediately evident when sensory information is conflicting or ambiguous and thus allows for more than one perceptual interpretation. Thinking the idea of perception as inference through to the end results in a blurring of boundaries between perception and action selection, as perceptual inference implies the construction of a percept as an active process. Here we therefore wondered whether perception shares a key characteristic of action selection, namely that it is shaped by reinforcement learning. In two behavioral experiments, we used binocular rivalry to examine whether perceptual inference can be influenced by the association of perceptual outcomes with reward or punishment, respectively, in analogy to instrumental conditioning. Binocular rivalry was evoked by two orthogonal grating stimuli presented to the two eyes, resulting in perceptual alternations between the two gratings. Perception was tracked indirectly and objectively through a target detection task, which allowed us to preclude potential reporting biases. Monetary reward or punishments were given repeatedly during perception of only one of the two rivaling stimuli. We found an increase in dominance durations for the percept associated with reward, relative to the non-rewarded percept. In contrast, punishment led to an increase of the non-punished compared to a relative decrease of the punished percept. Our results show that perception shares key characteristics with action selection, in that it is influenced by reward and punishment in opposite directions, thus narrowing the gap between the conceptually separated domains of perception and action selection. We conclude that perceptual inference is an adaptive process that is shaped by its consequences.

Multistable Perception and the Role of the Frontoparietal Cortex in Perceptual Inference

“…One approach does involve reports but dissociates them from transitions by requesting them at predetermined time points. At these times, participants report perceptual state (Brascamp et al 2015a, Mamassian & Goutcher 2005 or, alternatively, other judgments that correlate with perceptual state (Alais et al 2014, Wilbertz et al 2014, Yu & Blake 1992. Alternations can then be inferred, albeit with coarser temporal resolution compared to direct reports.…”

Using binocular rivalry to tag foreground sounds: Towards an objective visual measure for auditory multistability

“…A similar idea can be applied in binocular rivalry: Targets are presented on the dominant and suppressed stimulus, and successful detection is used as indirect measure of dominance. This approach has, for example, proved useful to assess statistical properties of rivalry transitions (Alais, Keetels, & Freeman, 2014) or to validate the veridicality of report in the context of a reinforcement paradigm (Wilbertz, van Slooten, & Sterzer, 2014). However, to achieve a moment-by-moment readout, sampling of the target-detection task has to be dense, such that the task of reporting the dominant percept is replaced by the task of detecting the target, leaving little resources for combinations with other tasks and prohibiting passive-viewing conditions.…”

Melodic sound enhances visual awareness of congruent musical notes, but only if you can read music

“…Rivalry offers a way to study the inferential nature of perception when the brain is confronted with conflicting sensory evidence (11,12). Within this context, recent studies imply that rivalry dynamics are governed by influences related to the likelihood of competing perceptual interpretations, such as motor actions (13), affective connotation (14)(15)(16), familiarity (17), and concomitant sensory input from other modalities (18)(19)(20). Here we examined the limits of susceptibility of rivalry to predictive influences by asking whether binocular rivalry dynamics depend on multisensory congruence between abstract representations familiar to individuals with expertise in that domain of abstraction.…”