Perception as hypothesis testing

Abstract

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the previously reported finding that the accuracy of perceptual recognition decreases as the amount of experience with degraded versions of a visual stimulus increases. Since this result is apparently predictable only from the view of perception as an active process of hypothesis generation, this negative-effect-of-prior-experience phenomenon has important implications for theoretical conceptualizations of perception. None of the current experiments yielded any evidence of less accurate perceptual identification with increased number of incomplete versions of the stimuli when accuracy was assessed with a cumulative measure of identification accuracy, but two of the experiments did provide such evidence when accuracy was assessed with a conditional measure of accuracy. Consideration of the complete pattern of results led to the conclusion that there is no real evidence that perception is impaired because of early experience with ambiguous versions of a subject. © 1978, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.