Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience

Perceptual priors refer to the effect of previous experiences on our perception. They were shown to have both high- and low-level contributions, yet their interaction is still unknown. Specifically, whether bias favoring recently experienced low-level features results from previous high-level perception, in-line with predictive coding, or alternatively – it reflects low-level, bottom-up driven memory component. To decipher that, we used the “missing fundamental illusion”, a well-studied phenomenon in auditory perception, that allows a dissociation between low-level frequency components and high-level pitch perception. Surprisingly, we found that low-level effects are determined by low-level memory components. Namely, when the fundamental was missing, there was no contraction to the high-level pitch, but rather to the physically present frequency!