TY - JOUR T1 - Humans treat unreliable filled-in percepts as more real than veridical ones JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/066217 SP - 066217 AU - Benedikt V. Ehinger AU - Katja Häusser AU - José Ossandón AU - Peter König Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/03/26/066217.abstract N2 - Humans often evaluate sensory signals according to their reliability for optimal decision-making. However, how do we evaluate percepts generated in the absence of direct input that are, therefore, completely unreliable? Here, we utilize the phenomenon of filling-in occurring at the physiological blind-spots to compare partially inferred and veridical percepts. Subjects chose between stimuli that elicit filling-in, and perceptually equivalent ones presented outside the blind-spots, looking for a Gabor stimulus without a small orthogonal inset. In ambiguous conditions, when the stimuli were physically identical and the inset was absent in both, subjects behaved opposite to optimal, preferring the blind-spot stimulus as the better example of a collinear stimulus, even though no relevant veridical information was available. Thus, a percept that is partially inferred is paradoxically considered more reliable than a percept based on external input. In other words: Humans treat filled-in inferred percepts as more real than veridical ones. ER -