Biased belief updating and suboptimal choice in foraging decisions.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Garrett N
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7347922 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:We propose a framework for general Bayesian inference. We argue that a valid update of a prior belief distribution to a posterior can be made for parameters which are connected to observations through a loss function rather than the traditional likelihood function, which is recovered as a special case. Modern application areas make it increasingly challenging for Bayesians to attempt to model the true data-generating mechanism. For instance, when the object of interest is low dimensional, such as a mean or median, it is cumbersome to have to achieve this via a complete model for the whole data distribution. More importantly, there are settings where the parameter of interest does not directly index a family of density functions and thus the Bayesian approach to learning about such parameters is currently regarded as problematic. Our framework uses loss functions to connect information in the data to functionals of interest. The updating of beliefs then follows from a decision theoretic approach involving cumulative loss functions. Importantly, the procedure coincides with Bayesian updating when a true likelihood is known yet provides coherent subjective inference in much more general settings. Connections to other inference frameworks are highlighted.
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Project description:The COVID-19 pandemic has made the world seem less predictable. Such crises can lead people to feel that others are a threat. Here, we show that the initial phase of the pandemic in 2020 increased individuals' paranoia and made their belief updating more erratic. A proactive lockdown made people's belief updating less capricious. However, state-mandated mask-wearing increased paranoia and induced more erratic behaviour. This was most evident in states where adherence to mask-wearing rules was poor but where rule following is typically more common. Computational analyses of participant behaviour suggested that people with higher paranoia expected the task to be more unstable. People who were more paranoid endorsed conspiracies about mask-wearing and potential vaccines and the QAnon conspiracy theories. These beliefs were associated with erratic task behaviour and changed priors. Taken together, we found that real-world uncertainty increases paranoia and influences laboratory task behaviour.
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Project description:We make a novel investigation of welfare costs associated with various suboptimal decisions made by retirees, both analytically and numerically. We utilize a unique framework that incorporates recursive utility with housing, and also encompasses expected utility and recursive utility without housing as special cases. Our findings indicate that under-investment in stocks incurs lower welfare costs compared to an equivalent over-investment. Suboptimal allocations in bond holdings result in higher costs than similar misallocations in stocks. Choosing not to participate in the stock market is less detrimental than avoiding the bond market. Should retirees opt to simplify their decision-making by investing solely in one type of asset, it is less costly for them to invest exclusively in bonds. Overconsumption of housing is less costly than an equivalent underconsumption. Suboptimal consumption imposes the highest welfare cost. Decisions regarding consumption, housing, and savings are found to be more crucial than the choice of how to distribute liquid savings between stocks and bonds. Additionally, recursive utility model better captures retirees' preference for bonds over stocks than expected utility model. Our results, which are consistent across various parameter settings, provide valuable insights for academics and policymakers aiming to enhance retiree welfare.
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Project description:BackgroundSurprising events are important sources of internal model updating which adjusts expectations for both decision-making and perceptual processing circuits. Anxious individuals display relatively intact updating of internal models used to make decisions, however how these individuals update their perceptual expectations remains poorly understood. Based on previous work, we hypothesized that anxious individuals experienced exaggerated surprise to predictable events, which imbues them with undue salience.MethodsTo model the rate of updating of internal models for both decision-making and perceptual processing, we applied a hybrid Rescorla Wagner (RW)/Drift Diffusion Model (DDM) to a change point detection task in a transdiagnostic group of individuals with mood and anxiety disorders and examined the relationship between learning rates and anxiety and negative affect.ResultsModel comparison provided evidence that decision-making and perceptual processing rely on separate internal models with different learning rates. Anxiety and older age were associated with slower updating of models used in perceptual processing, but not those used in decision-making.LimitationsThis was a cross-sectional study and lacked neural data to examine the role of specific brain circuits in updating of perceptual predictions.ConclusionsAnxious individuals display slower updating of internal models used in perceptual processing, but not those used in decision-making. This deficit could contribute to exaggerated salience of harmless stimuli in anxiety. The results have implications for the assessment and treatment of basic processing dysfunctions in anxiety.
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Project description:Pigeons have shown suboptimal gambling-like behavior when preferring a stimulus that infrequently signals reliable reinforcement over alternatives that provide greater reinforcement overall. As a mechanism for this behavior, recent research proposed that the stimulus value of alternatives with more reliable signals for reinforcement will be preferred relatively independently of their frequencies. The present study tested this hypothesis using a simplified design of a Discriminative alternative that, 50% of the time, led to either a signal for 100% reinforcement or a blackout period indicative of 0% reinforcement against a Nondiscriminative alternative that always led to a signal that predicted 50% reinforcement. Pigeons showed a strong preference for the Discriminative alternative that remained despite reducing the frequency of the signal for reinforcement in subsequent phases to 25% and then 12.5%. In Experiment 2, using the original design of Experiment 1, the stimulus following choice of the Nondiscriminative alternative was increased to 75% and then to 100%. Results showed that preference for the Discriminative alternative decreased only when the signals for reinforcement for the two alternatives predicted the same probability of reinforcement. The ability of several models to predict this behavior are discussed, but the terminal link stimulus value offers the most parsimonious account of this suboptimal behavior.
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