Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Concept Videos

Perceptual Constancy01:12

Perceptual Constancy

Perceptual constancy is the ability to recognize that objects remain consistent and unchanged even when their appearance varies due to changes in sensory input. There are four main types of perceptual constancy: size constancy, shape constancy, color constancy, and brightness constancy.
Size constancy is the recognition that an object remains the same size, even when its image on the retina changes. For instance, a bus is perceived to be large enough to carry people, even if it looks tiny from...
The Anchoring-and-Adjustment Heuristic01:25

The Anchoring-and-Adjustment Heuristic

In order to make good decisions, we use our knowledge and our reasoning. Often, this knowledge and reasoning is sound and solid. However, sometimes, we are swayed by biases or by others manipulating a situation. For example, let’s say you and three friends wanted to rent a house and had a combined target budget of $1,600. The realtor shows you only very run-down houses for $1,600 and then shows you a very nice house for $2,000. Might you ask each person to pay more in rent to get the $2,000...
Factors Affecting Perception01:25

Factors Affecting Perception

Perception is influenced by perceptual set, context, motivation, and emotion. Perceptual set, or perceptual expectancy, refers to the tendency to perceive things in a particular way, influenced by previous experiences and expectations. This phenomenon affects the interpretation of stimuli, creating a set of mental tendencies and assumptions that impact sensory perceptions of sound, taste, touch, and sight.
An illustrative example of a perceptual set is the scenario where an airline pilot told...
Gestalt Principles of Perception01:21

Gestalt Principles of Perception

Gestalt principles provide a framework for understanding how humans perceive objects as unified wholes within their context. These principles are essential in explaining the cognitive processes that make sense of complex visual stimuli by organizing them into coherent groups. One fundamental principle is proximity, which posits that objects located close to each other are perceived as a collective group. For instance, when dots are positioned near one another, the visual system interprets them...
The Representativeness Heuristic02:13

The Representativeness Heuristic

The representative heuristic describes a biased way of thinking, in which you unintentionally stereotype someone or something. For example, you may assume that your professors spend their free time reading books and engaging in intellectual conversation, because the idea of them spending their time playing volleyball or visiting an amusement park does not fit in with your stereotypes of professors.
Weighted Mean00:57

Weighted Mean

While taking the arithmetic, geometric, or harmonic mean of a sample data set, equal importance is assigned to all the data points. However, all the values may not always be equally important in some data sets. An intrinsic bias might make it more important to give more weightage to specific values over others.
For example, consider the number of goals scored in the matches of a tournament. While computing the average number of goals scored in the tournament, it may be more important to...

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Distinct roles of hippocampus and neocortex in symbolic compositional generalization.

Neuron·2026
Same author

Human curriculum learning of a cue combination task.

Nature human behaviour·2026
Same author

Technological <i>folie Ă  deux</i>: feedback loops between AI chatbots and mental health.

Nature. Mental health·2026
Same author

Contrasting holistic-compensatory with probabilistic heuristic strategies in multi-attribute decisions.

Psychonomic bulletin & review·2026
Same author

Understanding human metacontrol and its pathologies using deep neural networks.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·2026
Same author

Hybrid neural-cognitive models reveal how memory shapes human reward learning.

Nature human behaviour·2026
Same journal

Tau protein as a regulator of mitochondrial function and dynamics.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·2026
Same journal

A scalable, dividing cell model for the robust propagation and quantification of human sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease prions.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·2026
Same journal

Epigenetic regulation of mesenchymal BMP signaling directs postnatal organ innervation.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·2026
Same journal

Single-shot wide-field biochemical imaging at 1 kHz frame rate.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·2026
Same journal

Morphogenesis and topological evolution of a frustrated nematic liquid crystal under confinement.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·2026
Same journal

B cell-intrinsic CXCR3 drives efficient generation of ectopic pulmonary germinal center responses to influenza A virus infection.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·2026
See all related articles

Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 30, 2026

A Psychophysics Paradigm for the Collection and Analysis of Similarity Judgments
08:12

A Psychophysics Paradigm for the Collection and Analysis of Similarity Judgments

Published on: March 1, 2022

Robust averaging during perceptual judgment.

Vincent de Gardelle1, Christopher Summerfield

  • 1Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX13UD, United Kingdom. vincent.gardelle@gmail.com

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
|July 27, 2011
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Human perception relies on evidence reliability, not just strength. Our study reveals that people process varied evidence slower and less accurately, often downweighting extreme data points for better judgments.

More Related Videos

Investigating the Deployment of Visual Attention Before Accurate and Averaging Saccades via Eye Tracking and Assessment of Visual Sensitivity
06:46

Investigating the Deployment of Visual Attention Before Accurate and Averaging Saccades via Eye Tracking and Assessment of Visual Sensitivity

Published on: March 18, 2019

A Two-interval Forced-choice Task for Multisensory Comparisons
07:13

A Two-interval Forced-choice Task for Multisensory Comparisons

Published on: November 9, 2018

Related Experiment Videos

Last Updated: May 30, 2026

A Psychophysics Paradigm for the Collection and Analysis of Similarity Judgments
08:12

A Psychophysics Paradigm for the Collection and Analysis of Similarity Judgments

Published on: March 1, 2022

Investigating the Deployment of Visual Attention Before Accurate and Averaging Saccades via Eye Tracking and Assessment of Visual Sensitivity
06:46

Investigating the Deployment of Visual Attention Before Accurate and Averaging Saccades via Eye Tracking and Assessment of Visual Sensitivity

Published on: March 18, 2019

A Two-interval Forced-choice Task for Multisensory Comparisons
07:13

A Two-interval Forced-choice Task for Multisensory Comparisons

Published on: November 9, 2018

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Computational Neuroscience
  • Decision Science

Background:

  • Optimal decision-making requires evaluating evidence strength and reliability.
  • Previous research on perceptual judgments primarily focused on evidence mean (strength), neglecting variance (reliability).

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how human observers process heterogeneous decision-relevant evidence, considering both strength and reliability.
  • To determine if observers account for evidence variance in their perceptual judgments.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized a multielement averaging task to present heterogeneous evidence.
  • Controlled for signal strength, signal-to-noise ratio, category uncertainty, and low-level perceptual variability.
  • Developed and tested a probabilistic optimal model integrating log odds.

Main Results:

  • Human observers exhibited slower and less accurate processing of heterogeneous evidence.
  • Observers tended to exclude or downweight extreme evidence samples, similar to statistical outlier exclusion.
  • The observed phenomena were accurately predicted by a model integrating log odds.

Conclusions:

  • Evidence reliability significantly impacts perceptual judgment speed and accuracy.
  • Human observers employ strategies akin to robust averaging to handle untrustworthy evidence.
  • These findings suggest an evolutionary basis for robust averaging in mitigating unreliable evidence during perception.