Fig. 6

Overall prior mean shift (A). Shows participant’s encoded prior mean by experiment. Each coloured violin plot represents a single experiment. The black dot represents each study’s subjective prior mean. The X axis shows the location of the encoded prior mean as it appears on screen (note that the full screen width ranged from − 0.5 on the leftmost edge of the screen, 0.0 in the centre of the screen, to + 0.5 on the rightmost edge of the screen). Only the X-axis was measured in this task due to the net design (see Methods), therefore the Y axis here illustrates individual participant data points across the seven studies. The individual Y position within the experiment is arbitrary, used to reduce overlap between data points. The true prior mean is indicated by the black line at 0.0, while the solid red line shows the pooled estimate of the subjective prior mean across studies, which appears to the right of the true centre. All studies showed that the participants’ subjective representation of the true centre was, on average, to the right-hand side of its actual location on screen. Rightward bias in posterior responses across experiments (B). The vertical reference line x = 0 (as shown in black line) indicates the centre of the screen. Each coloured violin plot represents a single experiment. The black dots represent the mean of the posterior responses for that study. The red line indicates the common effect across studies for the average posterior response. A rightward bias was found across experiments. Note the discrepancy in the magnitude of the rightward bias between the participant’s prior mean and their posterior response.