Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, CA, 95616, USA.
School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 639798, Singapore.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2021 Apr 14;6(1):32. doi: 10.1186/s41235-021-00294-1.
A major problem in human cognition is to understand how newly acquired information and long-standing beliefs about the environment combine to make decisions and plan behaviors. Over-dependence on long-standing beliefs may be a significant source of suboptimal decision-making in unusual circumstances. While the contribution of long-standing beliefs about the environment to search in real-world scenes is well-studied, less is known about how new evidence informs search decisions, and it is unclear whether the two sources of information are used together optimally to guide search. The present study expanded on the literature on semantic guidance in visual search by modeling a Bayesian ideal observer's use of long-standing semantic beliefs and recent experience in an active search task. The ability to adjust expectations to the task environment was simulated using the Bayesian ideal observer, and subjects' performance was compared to ideal observers that depended on prior knowledge and recent experience to varying degrees. Target locations were either congruent with scene semantics, incongruent with what would be expected from scene semantics, or random. Half of the subjects were able to learn to search for the target in incongruent locations over repeated experimental sessions when it was optimal to do so. These results suggest that searchers can learn to prioritize recent experience over knowledge of scenes in a near-optimal fashion when it is beneficial to do so, as long as the evidence from recent experience was learnable.
人类认知中的一个主要问题是理解新获得的信息和关于环境的长期信念如何结合起来做出决策和规划行为。过度依赖长期信念可能是在不寻常情况下做出次优决策的一个重要来源。虽然关于环境的长期信念对现实场景搜索的贡献已经得到了很好的研究，但对于新证据如何影响搜索决策知之甚少，也不清楚这两个信息源是否能够一起被优化地用于指导搜索。本研究通过在主动搜索任务中对贝叶斯理想观察者使用长期语义信念和近期经验进行建模，扩展了关于视觉搜索中语义引导的文献。使用贝叶斯理想观察者模拟了根据任务环境调整期望的能力，并将受试者的表现与依赖于不同程度的先验知识和近期经验的理想观察者进行了比较。目标位置要么与场景语义一致，要么与从场景语义中预期的位置不一致，要么是随机的。在重复的实验过程中，当以最佳方式搜索目标时，一半的被试能够学会在不一致的位置搜索目标。这些结果表明，只要近期经验的证据是可学习的，搜索者就可以在有利的情况下以近乎最优的方式学会优先考虑近期经验而不是对场景的了解。
