To estimate the most likely state of the world despite noisy and incomplete sensory information, the human brain relies on prior knowledge about natural scene statistics 1. The nervous system might encode the overall statistics of the world, rather than the specific properties of the signals reaching the individual senses. This finding suggests the existence of a slow-motion prior in audition, analogous to the one previously found in vision. Here we observed a systematic bias for underestimating the speed of unreliable moving sounds.
Here we investigated whether an analogous tendency to underestimate speed also occurs in audition: even if the statistics of the visual environment seem to favor low speed, the statistics of the stimuli reaching the individual senses may differ across modalities, hence potentially leading to different priors. This finding has been interpreted in terms of a Bayesian prior favoring low speed, given that in natural visual scenes objects are mostly stationary or slowly-moving. Previous evidence has shown that humans tend to underestimate the speed of unreliable moving visual stimuli. Perception can often be described as a statistically optimal inference process whereby noisy and incomplete sensory evidence is combined with prior knowledge about natural scene statistics.
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