Mechanisms of Adaptive Choice History Biases in the Human Brain

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Tobias Donner
• Subject Area: Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: from 2014 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 259469422

• Final Report Year: 2023

Final Report Abstract

Human judgment is profoundly biased by the history of previous environmental states, judgments, or outcomes. Specifically, people tend to repeat (or alternate) their choices more frequently than expected by chance when evaluating noisy evidence in random sequence; and people tend to stick to their previous judgments even in the face of strong contradictory new evidence (“confirmation bias”). In this DFG project, we have performed psychophysical and neurophysiological studies to elucidate choice history biases in the human brain. We focused on choice history biases in perceptual decisions under uncertainty so as to exploit previously established neural population representations of sensory evidence, the resulting decision variable, and the eventual action plan. We performed detailed, computational model-based analyses of sequential patterns in choice behavior and quantitatively related the model parameters to magnetoencephalographic (MEG) or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures of neural dynamics in the cerebral cortex. This approach identified trial history-dependent biases in neural population activity, which were expressed in different formats and cortical regions, and some of which were key in mediating the behavioral biases. The development of novel behavioral tasks enabled us to also perform systematic manipulations of choice history biases or mechanistic comparisons between confirmation biases and selective attention. MEG studies using these novel tasks identified, among other things, a choice-induced allocation of endogenous attention as a plausible mechanism for confirmation bias. This project has provided new insights into the neurobiological bases of contextdependent human decision-making, including some apparent deviations from rationality.

Publications

• Pupil-linked arousal is driven by decision uncertainty and alters serial choice bias. Nature Communications, 8(1).
  Urai, Anne E.; Braun, Anke & Donner, Tobias H.
  
• Adaptive History Biases Result from Confidence-Weighted Accumulation of past Choices. The Journal of Neuroscience, 38(10), 2418-2429.
  Braun, Anke; Urai, Anne E. & Donner, Tobias H.
  
• Confirmation Bias through Selective Overweighting of Choice-Consistent Evidence. Current Biology, 28(19), 3128-3135.e8.
  Talluri, Bharath Chandra; Urai, Anne E.; Tsetsos, Konstantinos; Usher, Marius & Donner, Tobias H.
  
• Task-evoked pupil responses reflect internal belief states. Scientific Reports, 8(1).
  Colizoli, Olympia; de Gee, Jan Willem; Urai, Anne E. & Donner, Tobias H.
  
• Choice history biases subsequent evidence accumulation. eLife, 8.
  Urai, Anne E.; de Gee, Jan Willem; Tsetsos, Konstantinos & Donner, Tobias H.
  
• Confidence predicts speed-accuracy tradeoff for subsequent decisions. eLife, 8.
  Desender, Kobe; Boldt, Annika; Verguts, Tom & Donner, Tobias H.
  
• Our own choices generate biases for subsequent decisions. TheScienceBreaker, 05(02).
  Donner, Tobias H.; Talluri, Bharath Chandra & Urai, Anne E.
  
• Reinforcement biases subsequent perceptual decisions when confidence is low, a widespread behavioral phenomenon. eLife, 9.
  Lak, Armin; Hueske, Emily; Hirokawa, Junya; Masset, Paul; Ott, Torben; Urai, Anne E.; Donner, Tobias H.; Carandini, Matteo; Tonegawa, Susumu; Uchida, Naoshige & Kepecs, Adam
  
• Choices change the temporal weighting of decision evidence. Journal of Neurophysiology, 125(4), 1468-1481.
  Talluri, Bharath Chandra; Urai, Anne E.; Bronfman, Zohar Z.; Brezis, Noam; Tsetsos, Konstantinos; Usher, Marius & Donner, Tobias H.
  
• Decision making: How the past guides the future in frontal cortex. Current Biology, 31(6), R303-R306.
  Talluri, Bharath Chandra; Braun, Anke & Donner, Tobias H.
  
• Dynamic expressions of confidence within an evidence accumulation framework. Cognition, 207, 104522.
  Desender, Kobe; Donner, Tobias H. & Verguts, Tom
  
• Functional magnetic resonance imaging responses during perceptual decision‐making at 3 and 7 T in human cortex, striatum, and brainstem. Human Brain Mapping, 43(4), 1265-1279.
  Colizoli, Olympia; de Gee, Jan Willem; van der Zwaag, Wietske & Donner, Tobias H.
  
• Persistent activity in human parietal cortex mediates perceptual choice repetition bias. Nature Communications, 13(1).
  Urai, Anne E. & Donner, Tobias H.
  
• Adaptive biasing of action-selective cortical build-up activity by stimulus history.
  Braun, A. & Donner, T.H.