Park Hame, Arazi Ayelet, Chandra Talluri Bharath, Celotto Marco, Panzeri Stefano, Stocker Alan A, Donner Tobias H
Section Computational Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Martinistraße 52, Hamburg, 20251, Germany.
Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research, National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA.
Nat Commun. 2025 Jun 25;16(1):5391. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-61010-x.
Decision-makers often process new evidence selectively, depending on their current beliefs about the world. We asked whether such confirmation biases result from biases in the encoding of sensory evidence in the brain, or alternatively in the utilization of encoded evidence for behavior. Human participants estimated the source of a sequence of visual-spatial evidence samples while we measured cortical population activity with magnetoencephalography. Halfway through the sequence, participants were prompted to judge the more likely source category. We find that processing of subsequent evidence depends on its consistency with the previously chosen category. Evidence encoded in parietal cortex contributes more to the estimation report when that evidence is consistent with the previous choice compared to when it contradicts that choice. Our results indicate that information contradicting pre-existing beliefs has little impact on subsequent behavior, despite being precisely encoded in the brain. This provides room for deliberative control to counteract confirmation biases.
决策者通常会根据他们当前对世界的信念有选择地处理新证据。我们研究了这种确认偏差是源于大脑中感觉证据编码的偏差，还是源于编码证据在行为中的利用偏差。当我们用脑磁图测量皮层群体活动时，人类参与者估计一系列视觉空间证据样本的来源。在序列进行到一半时，参与者被要求判断更可能的来源类别。我们发现，后续证据的处理取决于它与先前选择的类别的一致性。与与先前选择相矛盾时相比，当顶叶皮层编码的证据与先前选择一致时，它对估计报告的贡献更大。我们的结果表明，与先前存在的信念相矛盾的信息尽管在大脑中被精确编码，但对后续行为几乎没有影响。这为深思熟虑的控制提供了空间，以抵消确认偏差。
