Individual believes about temporal continuity explain perceptual biases
Perceptual biases vary considerably between individuals. In the framework of probabilistic perception, these variations are commonly attributed to differences in sensory noise, which determines reliance on internal priors, and thus the size of biases. However, sensory noise is not the only determinant of perceptual outcomes: internal generative models, which express our believes about how stimuli are generated in the world, play a decisive role. These believes are mirrored in the types of explanatory models, static or iterative, offered in the literature. While static models are based on the assumption that consecutive stimuli are independent, iterative models presume some temporal continuity. Here we compare experimental results for time and distance estimation with model predictions and propose that interindividual differences cannot be explained by individual levels of sensory noise alone, but that differences in biases such as central tendency and serial dependence are based on individual believes expressed by different generative models.