The Effect of Priors on the Central Tendency Bias in Perceptual Judgments

The current study aims to examine a long-term perceptual history bias known as central tendency, by investigating how uncertainty of the prior distribution influences the bias in target representations. Specifically, we systematically manipulate signal-to-noise ratio of target stimuli (uncertainty) across blocks and investigate the magnitude of the central tendency bias in target estimates following a prior that is highly uncertain vs. more certain.