CAREER: Decision-induced Biases in Visual Percepts

认知科学早已证明，人类的决策往往会受到不良偏见的影响。一个基本问题是这种偏见的根本基础，以及它们最有可能出现在什么类型的情况下。现实世界的情况通常需要人类基于相同的视觉信息（例如，决定一种水果是苹果还是橙子，然后决定是吃那个水果还是吃旁边的那个）。很少有人知道不同的感知决策如何在这样的视觉处理序列中相互作用，但最近的一些研究数据表明，基于不确定的感官证据的感知决策可以在很大程度上使一个人随后对这些证据的感知产生偏差。在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，Stocker博士将进行和监督使用计算建模和人类心理物理实验相结合的方法的研究，以了解感知决策如何以及为什么会影响随后的视觉感知。具体来说，研究人员的目的是测试假设，大脑应用的决策策略，确保自我一致性的感官信息的解释在一系列的感知任务。这项研究将在理解更自然的条件下（决策不是独立做出的）感知决策方面迈出重要一步。拟议的研究结果也有可能提供一个重大的理论进步，在连接感知和认知，导致人类决策策略的统一理解。该研究有强烈依赖于人类专家进行视觉分析的证据在他们的决策程序（例如法医科学，医学科学）的直接应用。该研究的一个关键特征是其重点是大脑功能的计算建模。Stocker博士的目标是促进心理学和行为神经科学领域的严格定量方法。为此，为这个项目开发的建模技术将直接纳入研究员的研究生教学。此外，研究人员将组织一个年度建模研讨会的研究生和博士后研究员在心理学和神经科学，也将保持一个公开的学习工具库与他的建模方法。总之，这些努力将有助于促进和整合计算建模到主流神经科学和心理学课程。

Cognitive science has long established that human decision-making is often flawed by undesirable biases. A fundamental question concerns the underlying basis of such biases and in what types of situations they are most likely to appear. Real-world situations often require humans to perform sequences of decisions based on the same visual information (e.g., deciding whether a fruit is an apple or an orange and then deciding whether to eat that fruit or the one next to it). Very little is known about how different perceptual decisions interact in such visual processing sequences, yet data from a few recent studies suggest that a perceptual decision based on uncertain sensory evidence can substantially bias a person's subsequent percept of this evidence. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Stocker will conduct and oversee research that uses a combined approach of computational modeling and human psychophysical experiments in order to understand how and why perceptual decisions affect subsequent visual percepts. Specifically, the investigator aims to test the hypothesis that the brain applies a decision strategy that ensures self-consistency in the interpretation of sensory information across a sequence of perceptual tasks. The proposed research will constitute a major step forward in understanding perceptual decision making under more natural conditions (in which decisions are not made independently). The results of the proposed research also have the potential to provide a major theoretical advance in linking perception and cognition, leading to a unifying understanding of human decision making strategies.The research has direct applications for procedures that strongly rely on human experts to perform visual analyses of evidence in their decision-making (e.g. forensic sciences, medical sciences). A key feature of the research is its focus on the computational modeling of brain functions. Dr. Stocker's goal is to promote a rigid quantitative approach to the fields of psychology and behavioral neuroscience. Toward this end, the modeling techniques developed for this project will be directly incorporated in the investigator's graduate teaching. Furthermore, the investigator will organize a yearly modeling workshop for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in psychology and neuroscience, and will also maintain an online repository of publicly-available learning tools relating to his modeling methods. Together, these efforts will help promote and integrate computational modeling into the mainstream neuroscience and psychology curricula.