Humans actively sample evidence to support prior beliefs
- University of Oxford, United Kingdom
- University College London, United Kingdom
- Rutgers University, United States
- Princeton University, United States
Abstract
No one likes to be wrong. Previous research has shown that participants may underweight information incompatible with previous choices, a phenomenon called confirmation bias. In this paper we argue that a similar bias exists in the way information is actively sought. We investigate how choice influences information gathering using a perceptual choice task and find that participants sample more information from a previously chosen alternative. Furthermore, the higher the confidence in the initial choice, the more biased information sampling becomes. As a consequence, when faced with the possibility of revising an earlier decision, participants are more likely to stick with their original choice, even when incorrect. Critically, we show that agency controls this phenomenon. The effect disappears in a fixed sampling condition where presentation of evidence is controlled by the experimenter, suggesting that the way in which confirmatory evidence is acquired critically impacts the decision process. These results suggest active information acquisition plays a critical role in the propagation of strongly held beliefs over time.
Data availability
All data is available on the lab GitHub page (https://github.com/BDMLab).
Article and author information
Author details
Pradyumna Sepulveda
Benedetto De Martino
Funding
Wellcome Trust (Henry Dale Fellowship)
- Benedetto De Martino
Royal Society (Henry Dale Fellowship)
- Benedetto De Martino
Chilean National Agency for Research and Development (Scholarship)
- Pradyumna Sepulveda
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: All participants signed a consent form and both studies were done following the approval given by the University of Cambridge, Cambridge Psychology Research Ethics Committee (PRE.2015.095).
Reviewing Editor
- Valentin Wyart, École normale supérieure, PSL University, INSERM, France
Publication history
- Received: June 29, 2021
- Preprint posted: June 30, 2021 (view preprint)
- Accepted: April 8, 2022
- Accepted Manuscript published: April 11, 2022 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: April 25, 2022 (version 2)
- Version of Record updated: June 28, 2022 (version 3)
Copyright
© 2022, Kaanders et al.
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.
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Humans actively sample evidence to support prior beliefs
eLife 11:e71768.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.71768
Further reading
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- Neuroscience
Neural activity in the mammalian cortex has been studied extensively during decision tasks, and recent work aims to identify under what conditions cortex is actually necessary for these tasks. We discovered that mice with distinct cognitive experiences, beyond sensory and motor learning, use different cortical areas and neural activity patterns to solve the same navigation decision task, revealing past learning as a critical determinant of whether cortex is necessary for goal-directed navigation. We used optogenetics and calcium imaging to study the necessity and neural activity of multiple cortical areas in mice with different training histories. Posterior parietal cortex and retrosplenial cortex were mostly dispensable for accurate performance of a simple navigation task. In contrast, these areas were essential for the same simple task when mice were previously trained on complex tasks with delay periods or association switches. Multiarea calcium imaging showed that, in mice with complex-task experience, single-neuron activity had higher selectivity and neuron–neuron correlations were weaker, leading to codes with higher task information. Therefore, past experience is a key factor in determining whether cortical areas have a causal role in goal-directed navigation.
