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Social Information Is Integrated into Value and Confidence Judgments According to Its Reliability

De Martino, B; Bobadilla-Suarez, S; Nouguchi, T; Sharot, T; Love, BC; (2017) Social Information Is Integrated into Value and Confidence Judgments According to Its Reliability. Journal of Neuroscience , 37 (25) pp. 6066-6074. 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3880-16.2017. Green open access

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Abstract

How much we like something, whether it be a bottle of wine or a new film, is affected by the opinions of others. However, the social information that we receive can be contradictory and vary in its reliability. Here, we tested whether the brain incorporates these statistics when judging value and confidence. Participants provided value judgments about consumer goods in the presence of online reviews. We found that participants updated their initial value and confidence judgments in a Bayesian fashion, taking into account both the uncertainty of their initial beliefs and the reliability of the social information. Activity in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex tracked the degree of belief update. Analogous to how lower-level perceptual information is integrated, we found that the human brain integrates social information according to its reliability when judging value and confidence. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The field of perceptual decision making has shown that the sensory system integrates different sources of information according to their respective reliability, as predicted by a Bayesian inference scheme. In this work, we hypothesized that a similar coding scheme is implemented by the human brain to process social signals and guide complex, value-based decisions. We provide experimental evidence that the human prefrontal cortex's activity is consistent with a Bayesian computation that integrates social information that differs in reliability and that this integration affects the neural representation of value and confidence.

Type: Article
Title: Social Information Is Integrated into Value and Confidence Judgments According to Its Reliability
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3880-16.2017
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3880-16.2017
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2017 De Martino et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.
Keywords: Bayesian; confidence; integration; social; value; vmPFC
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 > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Experimental Psychology
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1558537
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