ArticleNature human behaviour2022
Efficient stabilization of imprecise statistical inference through conditional belief updating.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Competing cognitive pressures on human exploration in the absence of trade-off with exploitation.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Sensory integration, temporal prediction, and rule discovery reflect interdependent inference processes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Understanding learning through uncertainty and bias.Communications psychology · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Statistical inference is the optimal process for forming and maintaining accurate beliefs about uncertain environments. However, human inference comes with costs due to its associated biases and limited precision. Indeed, biased or imprecise inference can trigger variable beliefs and unwarranted changes in behaviour. Here, by studying decisions in a sequential categorization task based on noisy visual stimuli, we obtained converging evidence that humans reduce the variability of their beliefs by updating them only when the reliability of incoming sensory information is judged as sufficiently strong. Instead of integrating the evidence provided by all stimuli, participants actively discarded as much as a third of stimuli. This conditional belief updating strategy shows good test-retest reliability, correlates with perceptual confidence and explains human behaviour better than previously described strategies. This seemingly suboptimal strategy not only reduces the costs of imprecise computations but also, counterintuitively, increases the accuracy of resulting decisions.
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Registered trials
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.