Dataset Information

Developmental trajectory of social influence integration into perceptual decisions in children.

ABSTRACT: The opinions of others have a profound influence on decision making in adults. The impact of social influence appears to change during childhood, but the underlying mechanisms and their development remain unclear. We tested 125 neurotypical children between the ages of 6 and 14 years on a perceptual decision task about 3D-motion figures under informational social influence. In these children, a systematic bias in favor of the response of another person emerged at around 12 years of age, regardless of whether the other person was an age-matched peer or an adult. Drift diffusion modeling indicated that this social influence effect in neurotypical children was due to changes in the integration of sensory information, rather than solely a change in decision behavior. When we tested a smaller cohort of 30 age- and IQ-matched autistic children on the same task, we found some early decision bias to social influence, but no evidence for the development of systematic integration of social influence into sensory processing for any age group. Our results suggest that by the early teens, typical neurodevelopment allows social influence to systematically bias perceptual processes in a visual task previously linked to the dorsal visual stream. That the same bias did not appear to emerge in autistic adolescents in this study may explain some of their difficulties in social interactions.

SUBMITTER: Large I

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6377450 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Developmental trajectory of social influence integration into perceptual decisions in children.

Large Imogen I Pellicano Elizabeth E Mojzisch Andreas A Krug Kristine K

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20190128 7

The opinions of others have a profound influence on decision making in adults. The impact of social influence appears to change during childhood, but the underlying mechanisms and their development remain unclear. We tested 125 neurotypical children between the ages of 6 and 14 years on a perceptual decision task about 3D-motion figures under informational social influence. In these children, a systematic bias in favor of the response of another person emerged at around 12 years of age, regardle ...[more]

PMID: 30692264

Similar Datasets

Project description:Making informed decisions in noisy environments requires integrating sensory information over time. However, recent work has suggested that it may be difficult to determine whether an animal's decision-making strategy relies on evidence integration or not. In particular, strategies based on extrema-detection or random snapshots of the evidence stream may be difficult or even impossible to distinguish from classic evidence integration. Moreover, such non-integration strategies might be surprisingly common in experiments that aimed to study decisions based on integration. To determine whether temporal integration is central to perceptual decision-making, we developed a new model-based approach for comparing temporal integration against alternative 'non-integration' strategies for tasks in which the sensory signal is composed of discrete stimulus samples. We applied these methods to behavioral data from monkeys, rats, and humans performing a variety of sensory decision-making tasks. In all species and tasks, we found converging evidence in favor of temporal integration. First, in all observers across studies, the integration model better accounted for standard behavioral statistics such as psychometric curves and psychophysical kernels. Second, we found that sensory samples with large evidence do not contribute disproportionately to subject choices, as predicted by an extrema-detection strategy. Finally, we provide a direct confirmation of temporal integration by showing that the sum of both early and late evidence contributed to observer decisions. Overall, our results provide experimental evidence suggesting that temporal integration is an ubiquitous feature in mammalian perceptual decision-making. Our study also highlights the benefits of using experimental paradigms where the temporal stream of sensory evidence is controlled explicitly by the experimenter, and known precisely by the analyst, to characterize the temporal properties of the decision process.

Project description:Perceptual confidence is an important internal signal about the certainty of our decisions and there is a substantial debate on how it is computed. We highlight three confidence metric types from the literature: observers either use 1) the full probability distribution to compute probability correct (Probability metrics), 2) point estimates from the perceptual decision process to estimate uncertainty (Evidence-Strength metrics), or 3) heuristic confidence from stimulus-based cues to uncertainty (Heuristic metrics). These metrics are rarely tested against one another, so we examined models of all three types on a suprathreshold spatial discrimination task. Observers were shown a cloud of dots sampled from a dot generating distribution and judged if the mean of the distribution was left or right of centre. In addition to varying the horizontal position of the mean, there were two sensory uncertainty manipulations: the number of dots sampled and the spread of the generating distribution. After every two perceptual decisions, observers made a confidence forced-choice judgement whether they were more confident in the first or second decision. Model results showed that the majority of observers were best-fit by either: 1) the Heuristic model, which used dot cloud position, spread, and number of dots as cues; or 2) an Evidence-Strength model, which computed the distance between the sensory measurement and discrimination criterion, scaled according to sensory uncertainty. An accidental repetition of some sessions also allowed for the measurement of confidence agreement for identical pairs of stimuli. This N-pass analysis revealed that human observers were more consistent than their best-fitting model would predict, indicating there are still aspects of confidence that are not captured by our modelling. As such, we propose confidence agreement as a useful technique for computational studies of confidence. Taken together, these findings highlight the idiosyncratic nature of confidence computations for complex decision contexts and the need to consider different potential metrics and transformations in the confidence computation.

Dataset Information

Developmental trajectory of social influence integration into perceptual decisions in children.

Publications

Developmental trajectory of social influence integration into perceptual decisions in children.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets