Orientation uncertainty reduces perceived obliquity

The influence of prejudice on perception should be greatest when certainty about stimulus identity is least. We exploited this relationship to reveal visual biases for the cardinal orientations: vertical and horizontal. Specifically, when we increased the variance of orientations in an array of grating patches, estimates of the mean became less oblique. This result is consistent with a stable prior, or prejudice, for those orientations most prevalent in natural scenes.