CAREER: Decision-induced Biases in Visual Percepts

职业：决策引起的视觉感知偏差

• 批准号: 1350786
• 负责人: Alan Stocker
• 金额: $ 27.54万
• 依托单位: University of Pennsylvania
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-06-01 至 2019-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1350786&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Decision; induced; Biases; Visual

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.

认知科学早就证明，人类的决策往往会受到不受欢迎的偏见的影响。一个基本的问题涉及到这种偏见的潜在基础，以及在什么类型的情况下它们最有可能出现。现实世界的情况通常要求人类基于相同的视觉信息执行一系列决策（例如，决定一个水果是苹果还是橙子，然后决定是吃这个水果还是吃旁边的水果）。在这样的视觉处理序列中，不同的感知决策是如何相互作用的，我们所知甚少，但最近一些研究的数据表明，基于不确定的感官证据的感知决策可能会严重影响一个人对该证据的后续感知。在美国国家科学基金会（National Science Foundation）的支持下，Stocker博士将指导和监督一项研究，该研究将使用计算建模和人类心理物理实验相结合的方法，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，研究者的目的是验证这样一个假设，即大脑应用一种决策策略，确保在一系列感知任务中解释感觉信息的自我一致性。拟议的研究将在理解更自然条件下（决策不是独立做出的）的感知决策方面迈出重要一步。提出的研究结果也有可能在连接感知和认知方面提供重大的理论进展，从而导致对人类决策策略的统一理解。这项研究直接应用于在决策过程中强烈依赖人类专家对证据进行视觉分析的程序（例如法医学、医学）。该研究的一个关键特征是其对大脑功能的计算建模的关注。斯托克博士的目标是在心理学和行为神经科学领域推广一种严格的定量方法。为此，本项目开发的建模技术将直接纳入研究者的研究生教学。此外，研究者将为心理学和神经科学领域的研究生和博士后每年组织一次建模研讨会，并将维护一个与他的建模方法相关的公开学习工具的在线存储库。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。