Branch Fallon, Park Erin, Hegdé Jay
Department of Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University, Augusta, GA, United States.
Department of Psychological Sciences, Augusta University, Augusta, GA, United States.
Front Neurosci. 2022 May 20;16:745269. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2022.745269. eCollection 2022.
When making decisions under uncertainty, human subjects do not always act as rational decision makers, but often resort to one or more mental "shortcuts", or heuristics, to arrive at a decision. How do such "top-down" processes affect real-world decisions that must take into account empirical, "bottom-up" sensory evidence? Here we use recognition of camouflaged objects by expert viewers as an exemplar case to demonstrate that the effect of heuristics can be so strong as to override the empirical evidence in favor of heuristic information, even though the latter is random. We provided the viewers a random number that we told them was the estimate of a drone reconnaissance system of the probability that the visual image they were about to see contained a camouflaged target. We then showed them the image. We found that the subjects' own estimates of the probability of the target in the image reflected the random information they were provided, and ignored the actual evidence in the image. However, when the heuristic information was not provided, the same subjects were highly successful in finding the target in the same set of images, indicating that the effect was solely attributable to the availability of heuristic information. Two additional experiments confirmed that this effect was not idiosyncratic to camouflage images, visual search task, or the subjects' prior training or expertise. Together, these results demonstrate a novel aspect of the interaction between heuristics and sensory information during real-world decision making, where the former can be strong enough to veto the latter. This 'heuristic vetoing' is distinct from the vetoing of sensory information that occurs in certain visual illusions.
在不确定性条件下做决策时，人类受试者并不总是像理性决策者那样行事，而是常常诉诸一种或多种心理“捷径”，即启发法，来做出决策。这种“自上而下”的过程如何影响那些必须考虑经验性“自下而上”感官证据的现实世界决策呢？在此，我们以专家观察者对伪装物体的识别为例，来证明启发法的影响可能非常强烈，以至于能够推翻支持启发式信息的经验证据，即使后者是随机的。我们给观察者提供一个随机数，并告知他们这是无人机侦察系统对他们即将看到的视觉图像中包含伪装目标的概率的估计。然后我们向他们展示图像。我们发现，受试者对图像中目标概率的自身估计反映了他们所得到的随机信息，而忽略了图像中的实际证据。然而，当未提供启发式信息时，同样的受试者在同一组图像中找到目标的成功率很高，这表明这种效应完全归因于启发式信息的存在。另外两个实验证实，这种效应并非伪装图像、视觉搜索任务或受试者先前训练或专业知识所特有的。这些结果共同证明了现实世界决策过程中启发法与感官信息相互作用的一个新方面，即前者可能强大到足以否决后者。这种“启发式否决”不同于某些视觉错觉中发生的对感官信息的否决。
