Continuous Estimation of Mean and Uncertainty

Sensory uncertainty affects our perception and motor actions, but the mechanisms by which we estimate uncertainty are largely unexplored. We introduce a novel experimental paradigm that requires subjects to continuously report their (evolving) sufficient statistics of visual cues over time. We show that subjects rapidly accumulate evidence over the course of a trial to form an accurate estimate of the mean that equally weights all seen cues. Moreover, subjects have knowledge of their continuous objective uncertainty, although it is estimated with a conservative safety margin.