Decoupling sensory from decisional choice biases in perceptual decision making

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Abstract

The contribution of sensory and decisional processes to perceptual decision making is still unclear, even in simple perceptual tasks. When decision makers need to select an action from a set of balanced alternatives, any tendency to choose one alternative more often—choice bias—is consistent with a bias in the sensory evidence, but also with a preference to select that alternative independently of the sensory evidence. To decouple sensory from decisional biases, here we asked humans to perform a simple perceptual discrimination task with two symmetric alternatives under two different task instructions. The instructions varied the response mapping between perception and the category of the alternatives. We found that from 32 participants, 30 exhibited sensory biases and 15 decisional biases. The decisional biases were consistent with a criterion change in a simple signal detection theory model. Perceptual decision making, thus, even in simple scenarios, is affected by sensory and decisional choice biases.

Data availability

The data and the code to do the statistical analysis and create the figures is available at https://github.com/danilinares/2018LinaresAguilarLopezmoliner

The following data sets were generated

(2018) Decoupling sensory from decisional choice biases in perceptual decision making
Github, danilinares/2018LinaresAguilarLopezmoliner.

https://github.com/danilinares/2018LinaresAguilarLopezmoliner

Article and author information

Author details

Daniel Linares

Theoretical Neurobiology of Cortical Circuits, Institut d'Investigacions Biomediques August Pi i Sunyer (IDIBAPS), Barcelona, Spain

For correspondence
danilinares@gmail.com

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-7473-4184
David Aguilar-Lleyda

Centre d'Économie de la Sorbonne, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-6963-4069
Joan López-Moliner

Department of Cognition, Development and Psychology of Education, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Funding

Departament de Salut of the Generalitat de Catalunya (SLT002/16/00338)

Daniel Linares

Catalan Government (2017SGR-48)

Joan López-Moliner

Fudación Alicia Koplowitz

Daniel Linares

Project AEI/Feder, UE (PSI2017-83493R)

Joan López-Moliner

Departament de Salut of the Generalitat de Catalunya (SLT006/17/00362)

Daniel Linares

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: The study was approved by the ethical committee of the University of Barcelona (IRB00003099) and followed the requirements of the Helsinki convention. The participants, who did not know the hypothesis of the experiments, provided written consent to perform the experiments.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.