The Role of Inference in Perceptual Justification

This study investigates how feedback influences perceptual judgment, confidence, and calibration across repeated task cycles, with a particular focus on illusion-inducing perceptual tasks. The study is theoretically motivated by the contrast between inferentialist and dogmatist accounts of perceptual justification. Inferentialist views predict that feedback indicating correct answers supports experience-dependent updating of perceptual judgments and confidence, leading to gradual calibration and error reduction across trials. In contrast, dogmatist views hold that perceptual experience provides immediate justification independently of inference, and therefore predict limited or non-monotonic effects of feedback, especially in illusion-inducing contexts where perceptual appearance strongly biases judgment. Participants will complete repeated perceptual judgment tasks under one of three between-subjects conditions that manipulate the presence or absence of illusion-inducing stimuli and feedback. Primary dependent variables include judgment error and confidence ratings. The primary analyses focus on feedback-by-trial interactions and learning-related changes across task cycles. This preregistration specifies the study design, hypotheses, analysis plan, and sample size determination in advance of data collection for confirmatory inference.