PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Claire Chambers
AU  - Hugo Fernandes
AU  - Konrad Kording
TI  - Policies or Knowledge: Priors differ between perceptual and sensorimotor tasks
AID  - 10.1101/132829
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 132829
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/01/132829.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/01/132829.full
AB  - If the brain abstractly represents probability distributions as knowledge, then the modality of a decision, e.g. movement vs perception, should not matter. If on the other hand, learned representations are policies, they may be specific to the task where learning takes place. Here, we test this by asking if a learned spatial prior generalizes from a sensorimotor estimation task to a two-alternative-forced choice (2-Afc) perceptual comparison task. A model and simulation-based analysis revealed that while subjects learn the experimentally-imposed prior distribution in the sensorimotor estimation task, measured priors are consistently broader than expected in the 2-Afc task. That the prior does not fully generalize suggests that sensorimotor priors strongly resemble policies. In disagreement with standard Bayesian thought, the modality of the decision has a strong influence on the implied prior distributions.