Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Demographic perceptionthe perception of social quantities of geopolitical scale and social significancehas been extensivelystudied in cognitive and political science (Citrin & Sides, 2008; Gilens, 2001; Herda, 2013). Regular patterns of over-and under-estimation emerge which have historically been attributed to social factors such as fear of specific minorities(Gallagher, 2003; Wong, 2007). Other work has suggested that these patterns result from the psychophysics of the percep-tion of proportions (Landy, Guay & Marghetis, 2018). A Bayesian formulation suggests that biases in the estimation ofboth social proportions and simple visual properties result from a common source: hedging uncertain information towarda prior. Similar to work done by Zhang and Maloney (2012), we present a novel lab paradigm and two experiments thatfocus specifically on manipulating uncertainty in a simple (dot estimation) task, verifying the core assumptions of theBayesian approach.