Binding-Motivated Contextuality: A Cross-Domain Cyclic Test in Perception and Judgment
Abstract
Psychophysics and decision research study perceptual binding and judgment contextuality separately. We argue a binding-motivated perceptual task and judgment contextuality are scored against the same cyclic noncontextuality inequalities and share one convex global-consistency geometry (the correlations that mixtures of globally consistent assignments can produce), not one cohomology class. Only contextuality is tested, since binding's own residual vanishes here. Building on sheaf formulations of predictive coding (Seely 2025) and contextuality (Abramsky & Brandenburger 2011), a cyclic set of pairwise judgments without signalling admits a noncontextual explanation exactly when the cyclic inequalities hold (judgments do signal, so the test uses the disturbance-corrected form), and its severity is measured by the complete contextual fraction CF, the share of responses no noncontextual model reproduces (Abramsky, Barbosa & Mansfield 2017) rather than by the Cech invariant, which can miss it (Carù 2017). The perceptual arena uses two binary judgments per cyclic-dominance pairing; an appendix rejects the one-bit alternative on construct-validity grounds. The central test is cross-domain: one cohort performs both arenas, and a shared latent tolerance predicts a positive correlation between their signed cyclic margins V⋆, the pre-clamp quantities behind CF. Both are inconsistency scores, and general response consistency confounds a bare correlation, so each arena's margin is first regressed on its own variance- and reliability-matched control, and the residuals are correlated. A positive result would support a shared residual association, not a common causal mechanism, which we prove this design cannot identify at any sample size. All three tests are designed but unrun, and the perceptual arena awaits pilot gates. This is a methodological proposal, not a confirmatory report.
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BibTeX
@misc{shavit2026bindingmotivated,
title = {{Binding-Motivated Contextuality: A Cross-Domain Cyclic Test in Perception and Judgment}},
author = {Adam Y. Shavit},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.23977},
eprint = {2609.23977},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23977},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Binding-Motivated Contextuality: A Cross-Domain Cyclic Test in Perception and Judgment
AU - Adam Y. Shavit
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/21
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.23977
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23977
AB - Psychophysics and decision research study perceptual binding and judgment contextuality separately. We argue a binding-motivated perceptual task and judgment contextuality are scored against the same cyclic noncontextuality inequalities and share one convex global-consistency geometry (the correlations that mixtures of globally consistent assignments can produce), not one cohomology class. Only contextuality is tested, since binding's own residual vanishes here. Building on sheaf formulations of predictive coding (Seely 2025) and contextuality (Abramsky & Brandenburger 2011), a cyclic set of pairwise judgments without signalling admits a noncontextual explanation exactly when the cyclic inequalities hold (judgments do signal, so the test uses the disturbance-corrected form), and its severity is measured by the complete contextual fraction CF, the share of responses no noncontextual model reproduces (Abramsky, Barbosa & Mansfield 2017) rather than by the Cech invariant, which can miss it (Carù 2017). The perceptual arena uses two binary judgments per cyclic-dominance pairing; an appendix rejects the one-bit alternative on construct-validity grounds. The central test is cross-domain: one cohort performs both arenas, and a shared latent tolerance predicts a positive correlation between their signed cyclic margins V^⋆, the pre-clamp quantities behind CF. Both are inconsistency scores, and general response consistency confounds a bare correlation, so each arena's margin is first regressed on its own variance- and reliability-matched control, and the residuals are correlated. A positive result would support a shared residual association, not a common causal mechanism, which we prove this design cannot identify at any sample size. All three tests are designed but unrun, and the perceptual arena awaits pilot gates. This is a methodological proposal, not a confirmatory report.
ER -