PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Benedikt V. Ehinger
AU  - Katja Häusser
AU  - José Ossandón
AU  - Peter König
TI  - Mind over matter: A perceptual decision bias toward filled-in stimuli in the blind spot
AID  - 10.1101/066217
DP  - 2016 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 066217
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/07/27/066217.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/07/27/066217.full
AB  - Although there are no photoreceptors corresponding to the physiological blind spots, we experience visual content there as if it were veridical, when it is in fact only “filled in” based on the surroundings. Given that we have at least implicit knowledge that a stimulus is being filled in, could this knowledge bias our behavior? We asked subjects to choose between a stimulus partially presented in the blind spot that elicits filling in and another at the same eccentricity outside of the blind spot. Subjects displayed a bias toward the blind spot stimulus, where the filled-in part could have actually concealed a non-target (15.01%, CDI95: 8.49%–;21.08%). Two control experiments confirmed this finding. The preference for inferred versus veridical content suggests that the locally inferred percept is favored due to reduced external noise in concordance with predictive coding models of visual processing.