Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Toyota Research Institute, Los Altos, California, USA.
Br J Psychol. 2024 Nov;115(4):759-786. doi: 10.1111/bjop.12724. Epub 2024 Aug 3.
Prior beliefs are central to Bayesian accounts of cognition, but many of these accounts do not directly measure priors. More specifically, initial states of belief heavily influence how new information is assumed to be utilized when updating a particular model. Despite this, prior and posterior beliefs are either inferred from sequential participant actions or elicited through impoverished means. We had participants to play a version of the game 'Plinko', to first elicit individual participant priors in a theoretically agnostic manner. Subsequent learning and updating of participant beliefs was then directly measured. We show that participants hold various priors that cluster around prototypical probability distributions that in turn influence learning. In follow-up studies, we show that participant priors are stable over time and that the ability to update beliefs is influenced by a simple environmental manipulation (i.e., a short break). These data reveal the importance of directly measuring participant beliefs rather than assuming or inferring them as has been widely done in the literature to date. The Plinko game provides a flexible and fecund means for examining statistical learning and mental model updating.
先验信念是贝叶斯认知理论的核心，但许多此类理论并没有直接测量先验信念。更具体地说，初始信念状态会极大地影响在更新特定模型时如何假设新信息的使用。尽管如此，先验和后验信念要么是从参与者的连续行为中推断出来的，要么是通过简单的方法得出的。我们让参与者玩一个名为“Plinko”的游戏，首先以一种理论上不可知的方式引出每个参与者的先验信念。然后直接测量参与者信念的后续学习和更新。我们发现，参与者持有各种围绕典型概率分布的先验信念，而这些信念反过来又影响学习。在后续研究中，我们发现参与者的先验信念是稳定的，并且更新信念的能力受到简单环境操作（即短暂休息）的影响。这些数据表明，直接测量参与者的信念而不是假设或推断它们是很重要的，这在迄今为止的文献中已经得到了广泛的应用。Plinko 游戏为研究统计学习和心理模型更新提供了一种灵活而丰富的手段。
