To generate efficient behavior, probabilistic theories of perception propose to link internal representations and the incoming sensory input based on the subjective uncertainty the observer has about them. Episodic memories, that is episodes experienced earlier by the observer, are a significant part of the internal representations, yet it is unknown whether they are encoded with their uncertainty and if so, what governs the uncertainty of an episode. To address this issue, we conducted memory experiments on the encoding of episodic events, in which participants (N = 95) viewed a set of individually or concurrently presented oriented objects and later they had to recall these objects and their orientation and provide their subjective certainty about the orientation. The orientation of the objects in separate experiments was sampled from a uniform or Gaussian (bumped) distribution or in a condition when two of the three objects in each scene had identical orientation (glued). Calibratedness, the correlation between accuracy of the orientation and subjective (un)certainty was used to detect probabilistic coding. Recall of individually or concurrently presented objects with uniform orientation distribution confirmed that observers’ coding of these episodes was highly calibrated. The “glued” results showed significantly different overall accuracy between glued and unglued objects with nonsignificant correlation within a scene. Since correlations in accuracy between the two glued objects within a scene were significant, the overall advantage of glued objects had to originate from attention being drawn to the glued structure rather than better memory of certain scenes. Bumped results showed higher overall accuracy but reduced calibratedness indicating an effect of the learned meta-structure: both certain and uncertain guesses utilized the bump information. These results support the idea that, similarly to incoming sensory information, episodic memory is treated probabilistically in perceptual processes and that this process relies on both within-scene and across-scene structures.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *