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Dissociating Predictive and Postdictive Audiovisual Inference

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 3:00 – 5:00 pm PST, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Manda Fischer¹ (manda.fischer@utoronto.ca), Keisuke Fukuda^1,2; ¹University of Toronto Mississauga, ²University of Toronto

Our brains have the remarkable ability to use contextual information to resolve perceptual uncertainty. This reliance on context has been demonstrated when information is presented before a stimulus (supporting predictive inference) and after it (supporting postdictive inference). However, it remains unclear whether these two forms of inference rely on overlapping or distinct mechanisms. We addressed this question using an audiovisual working memory task designed to test how category-level auditory cues influence visual face perception during both preparatory attention and decision-making. On each trial, participants (N=31) briefly viewed a face morphed along a female–male continuum (100 ms) and later reconstructed it after a short retention interval (1900 ms) using a continuous morph slider. To manipulate auditory context, either a male or female voice was presented 1000 ms before (pre-cue) or after (post-cue) face onset. Mixed-effects modelling revealed that the voice cue biased face reconstructions toward the gender of the voice in both pre- and post-cue conditions. While auditory context reliably shaped visual memory reports in both a predictive and postdictive manner, these effects were not correlated within individuals, suggesting that different mechanisms may be employed. Moreover, initial evidence suggests that the effect of auditory context increases with increasing ambiguity of the visual input. We are currently expanding the sample (target N=84) to test this relationship more robustly. Taken together, our results suggest that distinct mechanisms underlie predictive and postdictive inference, each dynamically leveraging context to disambiguate visual input, especially when the fidelity of this input is low.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Multisensory