ArticleeLife2025
Humans adapt rationally to approximate estimates of uncertainty.
Article in eLife, 2025. 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
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Inferring the causes of noise from binary outcomes: A normative theory of learning under uncertainty.Psychological review · 2026Article
- A nonlinear relationship between prediction errors and learning rates in human reinforcement-learning.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Computational processes of simultaneous learning of stochasticity and volatility in humans.Nature communications · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Efficient learning requires estimation of, and adaptation to, different forms of uncertainty. If uncertainty is caused by randomness in outcomes (noise), observed events should have less influence on beliefs, whereas if uncertainty is caused by a change in the process being estimated (volatility) the influence of events should increase. Previously, we showed that humans respond appropriately to changes in volatility irrespective of outcome valence (Pulcu and Browning, 2017), but there is less evidence of a rational response to noise. Here, we test adaptation to variable levels of volatility and noise in human participants, using choice behaviour and pupillometry as a measure of the central arousal system. We find that participants adapt as expected to changes in volatility, but not to changes in noise. Using a Bayesian observer model, we demonstrate that participants are, in fact, adapting to estimated noise, but that their estimates are imprecise, leading them to misattribute it as volatility and thus to respond inappropriately.
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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.