Scientific thinking about the minds of humans and other animals has been transformed by the idea that the brain is Bayesian. A cornerstone of this idea is that agents set the balance between prior knowledge and incoming evidence based on how reliable or ‘precise’ these different sources of information are — lending the most weight to that which is most reliable. This concept of precision has crept into several branches of cognitive science and is a lynchpin of emerging ideas in computational psychiatry — where unusual beliefs or experiences are explained as abnormalities in how the brain estimates precision. But what precisely is precision? In this Primer we explain how precision has found its way into classic and contemporary models of perception, learning, self-awareness, and social interaction. We also chart how ideas around precision are beginning to change in radical ways, meaning we must get more precise about how precision works.

大脑是贝叶斯的观点已经改变了关于人类和其他动物思想的科学思维。这个想法的一个基石是，代理人根据这些不同信息来源的可靠性或“精确性”在先验知识和传入证据之间设置平衡——将最大权重放在最可靠的信息上。这种精确度的概念已经渗透到认知科学的多个分支中，并且是计算精神病学中新兴思想的关键——其中不寻常的信念或经历被解释为大脑如何估计精确度的异常。但究竟什么是精度? 在这本入门书中，我们将解释精确度如何进入经典和当代的感知、学习、自我意识和社会互动模型。我们还绘制了有关精确度的想法如何开始以激进的方式发生变化的图表，这意味着我们必须更精确地了解精确度的工作原理。