RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Human noise blindness drives suboptimal cognitive inference
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 268045
DO 10.1101/268045
A1 Santiago Herce Castañón
A1 Dan Bang
A1 Rani Moran
A1 Jacqueline Ding
A1 Tobias Egner
A1 Christopher Summerfield
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/08/07/268045.abstract
AB Humans typically make near-optimal sensorimotor judgments but show systematic biases when making more cognitive judgments. Here we test the hypothesis that, while humans are sensitive to the noise present during early sensory processing, 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 which is blind to integration noise. Our study provides a computationally grounded explanation of suboptimal cognitive inferences.