Trial-history biases in evidence accumulation can give rise to apparent lapses in decision-making

Trial history biases and lapses are two of the most common suboptimalities observed during perceptual decision-making. These suboptimalities are routinely assumed to arise from distinct processes. However, previous work has suggested that they covary in their prevalence and that their proposed neura...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inNature communications Vol. 15; no. 1; p. 662
Main Authors Gupta, Diksha, DePasquale, Brian, Kopec, Charles D., Brody, Carlos D.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London Nature Publishing Group UK 22.01.2024
Nature Publishing Group
Nature Portfolio
Subjects
631/378/2629/1409
631/378/2649/1409
Accumulation
Animals
Bias
Cognitive ability
Decision making
Humanities and Social Sciences
Male
Mental Processes
multidisciplinary
Rats
Reaction Time
Reaction time task
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Stochasticity
Substrates
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Trial history biases and lapses are two of the most common suboptimalities observed during perceptual decision-making. These suboptimalities are routinely assumed to arise from distinct processes. However, previous work has suggested that they covary in their prevalence and that their proposed neural substrates overlap. Here we demonstrate that during decision-making, history biases and apparent lapses can both arise from a common cognitive process that is optimal under mistaken beliefs that the world is changing i.e. nonstationary. This corresponds to an accumulation-to-bound model with history-dependent updates to the initial state of the accumulator. We test our model’s predictions about the relative prevalence of history biases and lapses, and show that they are robustly borne out in two distinct decision-making datasets of male rats, including data from a novel reaction time task. Our model improves the ability to precisely predict decision-making dynamics within and across trials, by positing a process through which agents can generate quasi-stochastic choices. Trial-history biases and lapses are two commonly observed suboptimalities in decision-making that have been traditionally considered distinct. In this study, the authors show that they can both arise from a single underlying mechanism.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 23
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/s41467-024-44880-5