Dataset Information

Response Bias Reflects Individual Differences in Sensory Encoding.

ABSTRACT: Humans exhibit substantial biases in their decision making even in simple two-choice tasks, but the origin of these biases remains unclear. I hypothesized that one source of bias could be individual differences in sensory encoding. Specifically, if one stimulus category gives rise to an internal-evidence distribution with higher variability, then responses should optimally be biased against that stimulus category. Therefore, response bias may reflect a previously unappreciated subject-to-subject difference in the variance of the internal-evidence distributions. I tested this possibility by analyzing data from three different two-choice tasks (ns = 443, 443, and 498). For all three tasks, response bias moved in the direction of the optimal criterion determined by each subject's idiosyncratic internal-evidence variability. These results demonstrate that seemingly random variations in response bias can be driven by individual differences in sensory encoding and are thus partly explained by normative strategies.

SUBMITTER: Rahnev D

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8641135 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Response Bias Reflects Individual Differences in Sensory Encoding.

Rahnev Dobromir D

Psychological science 20210701 7

Humans exhibit substantial biases in their decision making even in simple two-choice tasks, but the origin of these biases remains unclear. I hypothesized that one source of bias could be individual differences in sensory encoding. Specifically, if one stimulus category gives rise to an internal-evidence distribution with higher variability, then responses should optimally be biased against that stimulus category. Therefore, response bias may reflect a previously unappreciated subject-to-subject ...[more]

PMID: 34197259

Similar Datasets

Project description:Biases in sensory perception can arise from both experimental manipulations and personal trait-like features. These idiosyncratic biases and their neural underpinnings are often overlooked in studies on the physiology underlying perception. A potential candidate mechanism reflecting such idiosyncratic biases could be spontaneous alpha band activity, a prominent brain rhythm known to influence perceptual reports in general. Using a temporal order judgment task, we here tested the hypothesis that alpha power reflects the overcoming of an idiosyncratic bias. Importantly, to understand the interplay between idiosyncratic biases and contextual (temporary) biases induced by experimental manipulations, we quantified this relation before and after temporal recalibration. Using EEG recordings in human participants (male and female), we find that prestimulus frontal alpha power correlates with the tendency to respond relative to an own idiosyncratic bias, with stronger ? leading to responses matching the bias. In contrast, alpha power does not predict response correctness. These results also hold after temporal recalibration and are specific to the alpha band, suggesting that alpha band activity reflects, directly or indirectly, processes that help to overcome an individual's momentary bias in perception. We propose that combined with established roles of parietal ? in the encoding of sensory information frontal ? reflects complementary mechanisms influencing perceptual decisions.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The brain is a biased organ, frequently generating systematically distorted percepts of the world, leading each of us to evolve in our own subjective reality. However, such biases are often overlooked or considered noise when studying the neural mechanisms underlying perception. We show that spontaneous alpha band activity predicts the degree of biasedness of human choices in a time perception task, suggesting that alpha activity indexes processes needed to overcome an individual's idiosyncratic bias. This result provides a window onto the neural underpinnings of subjective perception, and offers the possibility to quantify or manipulate such priors in future studies.

Dataset Information

Response Bias Reflects Individual Differences in Sensory Encoding.

Publications

Response Bias Reflects Individual Differences in Sensory Encoding.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets