Decoupling sensory from decisional choice biases in perceptual decision making
- Institut d'Investigacions Biomediques August Pi i Sunyer (IDIBAPS), Spain
- Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France
- Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
Abstract
The contribution of sensory and decisional processes to perceptual decision making is still unclear, even in simple perceptual tasks. When decision makers need to select an action from a set of balanced alternatives, any tendency to choose one alternative more often—choice bias—is consistent with a bias in the sensory evidence, but also with a preference to select that alternative independently of the sensory evidence. To decouple sensory from decisional biases, here we asked humans to perform a simple perceptual discrimination task with two symmetric alternatives under two different task instructions. The instructions varied the response mapping between perception and the category of the alternatives. We found that from 32 participants, 30 exhibited sensory biases and 15 decisional biases. The decisional biases were consistent with a criterion change in a simple signal detection theory model. Perceptual decision making, thus, even in simple scenarios, is affected by sensory and decisional choice biases.
Data availability
The data and the code to do the statistical analysis and create the figures is available at https://github.com/danilinares/2018LinaresAguilarLopezmoliner
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Decoupling sensory from decisional choice biases in perceptual decision makingGithub, danilinares/2018LinaresAguilarLopezmoliner.
Article and author information
Author details
David Aguilar-Lleyda
Funding
Departament de Salut of the Generalitat de Catalunya (SLT002/16/00338)
- Daniel Linares
Catalan Government (2017SGR-48)
- Joan López-Moliner
Fudación Alicia Koplowitz
- Daniel Linares
Project AEI/Feder, UE (PSI2017-83493R)
- Joan López-Moliner
Departament de Salut of the Generalitat de Catalunya (SLT006/17/00362)
- Daniel Linares
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Maik C Stüttgen, University Medical Center Mainz, Germany
Ethics
Human subjects: The study was approved by the ethical committee of the University of Barcelona (IRB00003099) and followed the requirements of the Helsinki convention. The participants, who did not know the hypothesis of the experiments, provided written consent to perform the experiments.
Version history
- Received: November 28, 2018
- Accepted: March 23, 2019
- Accepted Manuscript published: March 27, 2019 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: April 11, 2019 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2019, Linares et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Decoupling sensory from decisional choice biases in perceptual decision making
eLife 8:e43994.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.43994
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