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Journal article

Context effects on probability estimation.

  • Lin WH Brain Mind Institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland.
  • Gardner JL Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America.
  • Wu SW Institute of Neuroscience, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan.
  • 2020-03-06
Published in:
  • PLoS biology. - 2020
Adult
Behavioral Research
Brain
Decision Making
Female
Gyrus Cinguli
Humans
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Models, Theoretical
Nontherapeutic Human Experimentation
Oxygen
Parietal Lobe
Photic Stimulation
Prefrontal Cortex
Probability
Reward
English Many decisions rely on how we evaluate potential outcomes and estimate their corresponding probabilities of occurrence. Outcome evaluation is subjective because it requires consulting internal preferences and is sensitive to context. In contrast, probability estimation requires extracting statistics from the environment and therefore imposes unique challenges to the decision maker. Here, we show that probability estimation, like outcome evaluation, is subject to context effects that bias probability estimates away from other events present in the same context. However, unlike valuation, these context effects appeared to be scaled by estimated uncertainty, which is largest at intermediate probabilities. Blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) imaging showed that patterns of multivoxel activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), and intraparietal sulcus (IPS) predicted individual differences in context effects on probability estimates. These results establish VMPFC as the neurocomputational substrate shared between valuation and probability estimation and highlight the additional involvement of dACC and IPS that can be uniquely attributed to probability estimation. Because probability estimation is a required component of computational accounts from sensory inference to higher cognition, the context effects found here may affect a wide array of cognitive computations.
Language
  • English
Open access status
gold
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/112025
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