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

ABSTRACT: 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 t

SUBMITTER: Gupta D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10803295 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature