Tactile length contraction as Bayesian inference
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To perceive, the brain must interpret stimulus-evoked neural activity. This is challenging: The stochastic nature of the neural response renders its interpretation inherently uncertain. Perception would be optimized if the brain used Bayesian inference to interpret inputs in light of expectations derived from experience. Bayesian inference would improve perception on average but cause illusions when stimuli violate expectation. Intriguingly, tactile, auditory, and visual perception are all prone to length contraction illusions, characterized by the dramatic underestimation of the distance between punctate stimuli delivered in rapid succession; the origin of these illusions has been mysterious. We previously proposed that length contraction illusions occur because the brain interprets punctate stimulus sequences using Bayesian inference with a low-velocity expectation. A novel prediction of our Bayesian observer model is that length contraction should intensify if stimuli are made more difficult to localize. Here we report a tactile psychophysical study that tested this prediction. Twenty humans compared two distances on the forearm: a fixed reference distance defined by two taps with 1-s temporal separation and an adjustable comparison distance defined by two taps with temporal separation t ≤ 1 s. We observed significant length contraction: As t was decreased, participants perceived the two distances as equal only when the comparison distance was made progressively greater than the reference distance. Furthermore, the use of weaker taps significantly enhanced participants' length contraction. These findings confirm the model's predictions, supporting the view that the spatiotemporal percept is a best estimate resulting from a Bayesian inference process.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".