Prior knowledge has been shown to facilitate the incorporation of visual stimuli into awareness. We adopted an individual differences approach to explore whether a tendency to ‘see the expected’ is general or method-specific. We administered a binocular rivalry task and manipulated selective attention, as well as induced expectations via predictive context, self-generated imagery, expectancy cues, and perceptual priming. Most prior manipulations led to a facilitated awareness of the biased percept in binocular rivalry, whereas strong signal primes led to a suppressed awareness, i.e., adaptation. Correlations and factor analysis revealed that the facilitatory effect of priors on visual awareness is closely related to attentional control. We also investigated whether expectation-based biases predict perceptual abilities. Adaptation to strong primes predicted improved naturalistic change detection and the facilitatory effect of weak primes predicted the experience of perceptual anomalies. Taken together, our results indicate that the facilitatory effect of priors may be underpinned by an attentional mechanism but the tendency to ‘see the expected’ is method-specific.

先前的知识已被证明有助于将视觉刺激纳入意识。我们采用个体差异方法来探索“看到预期”的倾向是普遍的还是特定于方法的。我们执行了一项双眼竞争任务并操纵选择性注意，以及通过预测上下文、自我生成的意象、预期线索和知觉启动来诱发预期。. 大多数先前的操作导致了对双眼竞争中的偏见知觉的促进意识，而强烈的信号素数导致了抑制意识，即适应。相关性和因素分析表明，先验对视觉意识的促进作用与注意力控制密切相关。我们还调查了基于期望的偏见是否可以预测感知能力。对强素数的适应预测了改进的自然变化检测，弱素数的促进作用预测了感知异常的经验。总之，我们的结果表明先验的促进作用可能受到注意机制的支持，但“看到预期”的趋势是特定于方法的。