New article on local and global probability
What does that mean: local or global probability? We find that we build up representations of our environments and we use that model to guide our decisions about what to do and what to expect. One type of such models seem to be probabilistic: how likely that X will happen if I do Y or am in state Z? But is this a single construct or do we have multiple representations that get synthesized into action?
We have know since the work of Navon that we seem to have local and global perceptual representations, and that we seem to have a representation of events near or far in space or time, so maybe we also have distinct probabilistic representations for events that are local or global? The precise meaning of global and local is given in Isabella Sewell's paper, just published in Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. Participants were predicting the direction a triangle would point over a long sequence of presentations. Probabilities varied and could depend on either a global bias (whether up was more likely) or a local bias (which direction the prior triangle pointed). Isabella found very consistent results over two experiments that it was only the local probability bias that influenced peoples' responses. Check out the work of this undergraduate first authored paper at: