Sanborn Adam N, Zhu Jian-Qiao, Spicer Jake, León-Villagrá Pablo, Castillo Lucas, Falbén Johanna K, Li Yun-Xiao, Tee Aidan, Chater Nick
Department of Psychology, University of Warwick.
Department of Computer Science, Princeton University.
Perspect Psychol Sci. 2025 May;20(3):572-589. doi: 10.1177/17456916241258951. Epub 2025 Mar 4.
Noise in behavior is often considered a nuisance: Although the mind aims for the best possible action, it is let down by unreliability in the sensory and response systems. Researchers often represent noise as additive, Gaussian, and independent. Yet a careful look at behavioral noise reveals a rich structure that defies easy explanation. First, in both perceptual and preferential judgments sensory and response noise may potentially play only minor roles, with most noise arising in the cognitive computations. Second, the functional form of the noise is both non-Gaussian and nonindependent, with the distribution of noise being better characterized as heavy-tailed and as having substantial long-range autocorrelations. It is possible that this structure results from brains that are, for some reason, bedeviled by a fundamental design flaw, albeit one with intriguingly distinctive characteristics. Alternatively, noise might not be a bug but a feature. Specifically, we propose that the brain approximates probabilistic inference with a local sampling algorithm, one using randomness to drive its exploration of alternative hypotheses. Reframing cognition in this way explains the rich structure of noise and leads to the surprising conclusion that noise is not a symptom of cognitive malfunction but plays a central role in underpinning human intelligence.
尽管大脑旨在采取尽可能最佳的行动，但感觉和反应系统的不可靠性使其受挫。研究人员常常将噪声表示为加性、高斯且独立的。然而，仔细观察行为噪声会发现其具有丰富的结构，难以轻易解释。首先，在感知和偏好判断中，感觉和反应噪声可能仅起次要作用，大部分噪声产生于认知计算过程中。其次，噪声的函数形式既非高斯分布也非独立分布，其噪声分布更适合用重尾分布和具有显著的长程自相关来描述。这种结构有可能是由于大脑出于某种原因，受到一个基本设计缺陷的困扰，尽管这个缺陷具有引人入胜的独特特征。或者，噪声可能并非是一个缺陷，而是一个特点。具体而言，我们提出大脑通过一种局部采样算法来近似概率推理，该算法利用随机性来推动对替代假设的探索。以这种方式重新构建认知能够解释噪声的丰富结构，并得出一个惊人的结论：噪声并非认知功能失调的症状，而是在支撑人类智能方面发挥着核心作用。
