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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jan 19, 2026

Development of a Gaze-Contingent Display Framework Designed for Perceptual and Oculomotor Research with Simulated Central Vision Loss

Development of a Gaze-Contingent Display Framework Designed for Perceptual and Oculomotor Research with Simulated Central Vision Loss

Published on: April 11, 2025

Variable precision in visual perception.

Shan Shen¹, Wei Ji Ma²

¹Department of Neuroscience.

Psychological Review

|October 19, 2018

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Human responses vary due to sensory noise and guessing. This study investigated if sensory precision also varies in visual perception tasks, finding little evidence for this effect overall.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Visual Perception
Computational Neuroscience

Background:

Human observers exhibit response variability despite identical stimuli.
Sources of variability include sensory noise and guessing.
Previous studies suggest variable precision in visual short-term memory (STM), but not in perceptual tasks.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate evidence for variable sensory precision in visual perception tasks.
To examine the influence of distractor stimuli on response variability.
To compare multiple statistical models to accurately assess precision variability.

Main Methods:

Evaluated 11 visual perception tasks focusing on orientation discrimination.
Manipulated distractor stimuli (absent, homogeneous fixed, homogeneous variable, heterogeneous variable).
Employed factorial model comparison with metrics like AIC and BIC to assess guessing and precision variability, including potential confounders.

Main Results:

Initial analysis suggested strong evidence for variable precision in 5 experiments.
After accounting for confounding factors (oblique effect, decision noise) and suboptimal decision rules, evidence for variable precision diminished significantly.
Strong evidence remained only in tasks with homogeneous but variable distractors, and this too disappeared with further model refinement.

Conclusions:

Overall, the study found little evidence for variable sensory precision in visual perception tasks.
A slight hint of variable precision was observed only under specific conditions of variable distractors.
Highlights the critical importance of comprehensive factorial model comparison to avoid erroneous conclusions.