Information Foraging for Perceptual Decisions

Abstract

We tested an information foraging framework to characterize the mechanisms that drive active (visual) sampling behavior in decision problems that involve multiple sources of information. Experiments 1 through 3 involved participants making an absolute judgment about the direction of motion of a single random dot motion pattern. In Experiment 4, participants made a relative comparison between 2 motion patterns that could only be sampled sequentially. Our results show that: (a) Information (about noisy motion information) grows to an asymptotic level that depends on the quality of the information source; (b) The limited growth is attributable to unequal weighting of the incoming sensory evidence, with early samples being weighted more heavily; (c) Little information is lost once a new source of information is being sampled; and (d) The point at which the observer switches from 1 source to another is governed by online monitoring of his or her degree of (un)certainty about the sampled source. These findings demonstrate that the sampling strategy in perceptual decision-making is under some direct control by ongoing cognitive processing. More specifically, participants are able to track a measure of (un)certainty and use this information to guide their sampling behavior.

Decision Prioritization and Causal Reasoning in Decision Hierarchies

“…The number of queries was not predetermined, but depended on the difficulty of the decision and the depth of the decision in the decision tree. Participants requested more information when decisions were difficult (Desender et al, 2018(Desender et al, , 2019Ludwig and Evens, 2017). They also made more re-queries at the higher levels of the decision tree than at the lower levels, which explains why the former decisions were more accurate (Fig.…”