Herce Castañón, S;
Moran, R;
Ding, J;
Egner, T;
Bang, D;
Summerfield, C;
(2019)
Human noise blindness drives suboptimal cognitive inference.
Nature Communications
, 10
, Article 1719. 10.1038/s41467-019-09330-7.
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Abstract
Humans typically make near-optimal sensorimotor judgements but show systematic biases when making more cognitive judgements. Here we test the hypothesis that, while humans are sensitive to the noise present during early sensory encoding, the “optimality gap” arises because they are blind to noise introduced by later cognitive integration of variable or discordant pieces of information. In six psychophysical experiments, human observers judged the average orientation of an array of contrast gratings. We varied the stimulus contrast (encoding noise) and orientation variability (integration noise) of the array. Participants adapted near-optimally to changes in encoding noise, but, under increased integration noise, displayed a range of suboptimal behaviours: they ignored stimulus base rates, reported excessive confidence in their choices, and refrained from opting out of objectively difficult trials. These overconfident behaviours were captured by a Bayesian model blind to integration noise. Our study provides a computationally grounded explanation of human suboptimal cognitive inference.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Human noise blindness drives suboptimal cognitive inference |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41467-019-09330-7 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09330-7 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology > Imaging Neuroscience |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10072797 |
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