Workshop on Probability, Guessing and their role role in Infant and Adult cognition

Luca Bonatti

Erno Teglas (Central European University) & Justin Halberda (Johns Hopkins University)

Abstract

10:30 - 11:45: Erno Teglas

From possibilities to guesses and back

Abstract
In situations where outcomes are uncertain and information is limited, individuals often rely on guesses to anticipate what may occur. As new evidence becomes available, it can serve to refine these initial assumptions. Prior research indicates that infants and young preschoolers tend to conflate their “guesses” with reality until approximately four years of age, a tendency that can give rise to systematic decision‑making errors (Leahy & Carey, 2020). Despite the significance of this issue, the specific role of guessing in early decision‑making remains insufficiently understood. In this talk, I will present studies that bring us closer to clarifying these questions and provide insight into whether and how possibilities are represented in early development.

Small break

12:00 - 13:15: Justin Halberda, Caroline Myers, Chaz Firestone

Guessing reveals internal models of perceptual precision

Abstract
When observers lack sufficient information to support a confident response, they often guess. Guessing plays a pervasive role in visual cognition and working memory, yet the mechanisms that govern how observers generate guesses remain poorly understood. Standard models traditionally assume that responses produced in the absence of information are either uniformly distributed over feature space or are perhaps weighted towards prevailing environmental statistics. In contrast, here we consider an intriguing alternative: that guesses incorporate observers’ knowledge of their own perceptual capacities. We empirically measured guessing by eliciting responses under extreme target uncertainty (Experiment 1) as well as a novel “0ms presentation” approach in which no stimulus appeared but subjects believed one had (Experiment 2). We evaluated three accounts of guesses under these conditions: unsystematic (lapse) responding, biases toward environmental statistics, and a self-representational account in which guesses reflect observers’ knowledge of their own feature-dependent precision (e.g., preferring to guess feature values they believe they would be likely to miss). Guess responses were non-uniform and systematically biased toward feature values typically encoded with the least precision (e.g., oblique orientations) — a counterintuitive bias away from high-frequency, high-fidelity feature values (e.g., cardinal orientations). This complementary relationship between guessing and perceptual fidelity held within individuals and across paradigms, and was recoverable via an empirical-guess mixture model that replaced the standard uniform assumption with empirically measured guess distributions. Our findings challenge prevailing views that guesses reflect random noise, and suggest instead that guessing behavior reflects metacognitive knowledge of internal precision. Rather than defaulting to environmental priors, observers appear to model their own sensory limitations and leverage these representations to inform decisions in the absence of evidence. These results reframe guessing as a theoretically informative behavior that expresses observers’ own beliefs about their perceptual capacities.