ArticlePLoS computational biology2021
A confirmation bias in perceptual decision-making due to hierarchical approximate inference.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed.
- Computational Characterization of Decision Making During Trans-saccadic Visual Perception.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Reassessing Choice Probability: What 59 Macaque Studies Tell Us About Decision-Related Activity in Visual Cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Task learning increases information redundancy of neural responses in macaque visual cortex.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Changing the frame: the impact of welfare narrative presentation on citizen choices about cow-calf separation.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2026Article
- Confirmation bias through selective readout of information encoded in human parietal cortex.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Crosstalk between delayed and immediate subjective evaluation tasks.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Confirmation Bias through Selective Readout of Information Encoded in Human Parietal Cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- A population representation of the confidence in a decision in the parietal cortex.Cell reports · 2025Article
- Bayesian inference by visuomotor neurons in the prefrontal cortex.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Perceptual learning improves discrimination but does not reduce distortions in appearance.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- A Population Representation of the Confidence in a Decision in the Parietal Cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Bayesian inference by visuomotor neurons in prefrontal cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Article
- How does V1 population activity inform perceptual certainty?Journal of vision · 2024Article
- Earlier social information has a stronger influence on judgments.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Bayesian encoding and decoding as distinct perspectives on neural coding.Nature neuroscience · 2023Review
- Rapid runtime learning by curating small datasets of high-quality items obtained from memory.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Weak evidence for neural correlates of task-switching in macaque V1.Journal of neurophysiology · 2023Article
- Neural Mechanisms That Make Perceptual Decisions Flexible.Annual review of physiology · 2023Review
- Touching the (almost) untouchable: a minimally invasive workflow for microbiological and biomolecular analyses of cultural heritage objects.Frontiers in microbiology · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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Abstract
Making good decisions requires updating beliefs according to new evidence. This is a dynamical process that is prone to biases: in some cases, beliefs become entrenched and resistant to new evidence (leading to primacy effects), while in other cases, beliefs fade over time and rely primarily on later evidence (leading to recency effects). How and why either type of bias dominates in a given context is an important open question. Here, we study this question in classic perceptual decision-making tasks, where, puzzlingly, previous empirical studies differ in the kinds of biases they observe, ranging from primacy to recency, despite seemingly equivalent tasks. We present a new model, based on hierarchical approximate inference and derived from normative principles, that not only explains both primacy and recency effects in existing studies, but also predicts how the type of bias should depend on the statistics of stimuli in a given task. We verify this prediction in a novel visual discrimination task with human observers, finding that each observer's temporal bias changed as the result of changing the key stimulus statistics identified by our model. The key dynamic that leads to a primacy bias in our model is an overweighting of new sensory information that agrees with the observer's existing belief-a type of 'confirmation bias'. By fitting an extended drift-diffusion model to our data we rule out an alternative explanation for primacy effects due to bounded integration. Taken together, our results resolve a major discrepancy among existing perceptual decision-making studies, and suggest that a key source of bias in human decision-making is approximate hierarchical inference.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.