The Neural Basis of Belief Updating and Rational Decision Making

Staats- und Gesellschaftswissenschaften

Achtziger, Anja, Alós-Ferrer, Carlos, Hügelschäfer, Sabine, Steinhauser, Marco

The Neural Basis of Belief Updating and Rational Decision Making

Achtziger, Anja, Alós-Ferrer, Carlos, Hügelschäfer, Sabine, Steinhauser, Marco: The Neural Basis of Belief Updating and Rational Decision Making, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2014 (9(1)): 55-62: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/scan/nss099.

Originalarbeiten in wissenschaftlichen Fachzeitschriften mit Review-Verfahren

Rational decision making under uncertainty requires forming beliefs which integrate prior and new information through Bayes’ rule. Human decision makers typically deviate from Bayesian updating by either overweighting the prior (conservatism) or overweighting new information (e.g., the representativeness heuristic). We investigated these deviations through measurements of electrocortical activity in the human brain during incentivized probability updating tasks and found evidence of extremely early commitment to boundedly rational heuristics. Participants who overweight new information display a lower sensibility to conflict detection, captured by an event-related potential (the N2) observed around 260 ms after the presentation of new information. Conservative decision makers (who overweight prior probabilities) make up their mind before new information is presented, as indicated by the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) in the brain. That is, they do not inhibit the processing of new information but rather immediately rely on the prior for making a decision.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/scan/nss099