Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA.
Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, USA.
Sci Rep. 2018 Apr 18;8(1):6229. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-24528-3.
Prior expectations can bias evaluative judgments of sensory information. We show that information about a performer's status can bias the evaluation of musical stimuli, reflected by differential activity of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Moreover, we demonstrate that decreased susceptibility to this confirmation bias is (a) accompanied by the recruitment of and (b) correlated with the white-matter structure of the executive control network, particularly related to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). By using long-duration musical stimuli, we were able to track the initial biasing, subsequent perception, and ultimate evaluation of the stimuli, examining the full evolution of these biases over time. Our findings confirm the persistence of confirmation bias effects even when ample opportunity exists to gather information about true stimulus quality, and underline the importance of executive control in reducing bias.
先前的期望会影响对感官信息的评价判断。我们发现，表演者的地位信息会影响对音乐刺激的评价，这反映在腹内侧前额叶皮层（vmPFC）的活动差异上。此外，我们还证明，这种确认偏差的敏感性降低与（a）执行控制网络的白质结构的招募和（b）相关，特别是与背外侧前额叶皮层（dlPFC）相关。通过使用长时间的音乐刺激，我们能够跟踪对这些刺激的初始偏见、后续感知和最终评价，考察这些偏见随时间的演变过程。我们的发现证实了确认偏差效应的持久性，即使有充足的机会收集有关真实刺激质量的信息，也同样如此，这突显了执行控制在减少偏差方面的重要性。
