This coming Monday, Alexis Pérez Bellido, from Dynamics of memory formation group, will be presenting the talk:
High metacognitive efficiency reverses the negative effect of confirmation bias in repeated perceptual decision-making tasks
Humans are “suboptimal” decision makers. When presented multiple times with similar information, we have a natural tendency to repeat our previous choices despite of being mistaken. This repetition bias does not exclusively depend on response-level biases. In fact, it has been shown that in perceptual decision-making tasks, we integrate information asymmetrically by giving stronger weight to that information that is consistent with our previous beliefs, in line with confirmation bias. In this study, we used reverse correlation to describe how choice dependent consistency biases are determined by participants metacognitive skills. We presented participants with repeated sequences of six differently oriented gratings. After each sequence, participants categorized whether the mean orientation of the sequence was closer to the cardinal or the diagonal axis. Repeated sequences contained the same average category information as in the first presentation, but in half of the repetitions the participants experienced exactly the same sequence of oriented gratings presented before and in the other half gratings were oriented different. As expected, our results showed that participants were biased to repeat previous choices and weighted more the information that was consistent with their previous decisions. However, participants exposed twice with exactly the same stimuli sequences experienced stronger confirmatory biases. Interestingly we found that participant’s metacognitive efficiency reduced the degrading effect of confirmation bias on repeated decisions. Moreover, individual differences in “stubbornness” (an information independent bias to repeat previous choices) paired with lower metacognitive sensitivity predicted poorer performance. This study demonstrates that differences in consistency between previous decisions and sensory information induce biases in evidence accumulation. However, confirmation bias might be adaptive when paired with high metacognitive efficiency. Finally, we also show that a lack of flexibility (“stubbornness”) of participants to change their mind critically harmed their ability to improve their perceptual decisions.
Location: Online (ZOOM). Click here to join the meeting