Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We propose a unified explanation of contrastive and assimila-tive adaptation aftereffects from the perspective of higher-levelcognitive processes: rational category learning and categoricalperception. We replicate (twice) previously reported assimila-tive and contrastive effects (Uznadze illusion in visual modal-ity), propose a rational computational model of the process,and evaluate our model performance against the Bayesian lo-gistic regression baseline. We conclude by discussing theo-retical implications of our study and directions for further re-search.