According to the ideomotor principle, repeated experience with an action and its perceivable consequences (effects) establish action-effect associations. Research on verbal instructions indicates that such associations are also acquired from verbal information. In the present experiment (N = 651), first, we aimed to replicate unintentional response-priming effects from verbal action-effect instructions (direct replication; Condition 1). Second, we investigated the involvement of perceptual processes in the verbally induced response-priming effect by perceptually...

Much recent work has shown that children actively shape their learning progress by choosing what, when and from whom they want to learn. However less is known about whether children are sensitive to gaps in their knowledge, and whether they selectively solicit information about items they previously indicated having a knowledge gap about. In a cross-situational word-learning task, we asked 5-year-olds, 6-9-year-olds and adults to estimate their knowledge of newly learned word-object associations. We then examined whether participants preferentially chose to hear the...

Considerable evidence suggests that people value the freedom of choice. However, it is unclear whether this preference for choice stems purely from choice’s intrinsic value, or whether people prefer to choose because it tends to provide instrumental information about desirable outcomes. To address this question, we asked participants (n=200) to complete a two-stage choice task in which they could freely choose to exert choice or not. Borrowing a concept from information theory—mutual information—we manipulated the instrumental contingency between participants’...

Analogies to stochastic optimization are common in developmental psychology, describing a gradual reduction in randomness (cooling off) over the lifespan. Yet for lack of concrete empirical comparison, there is ambiguity in interpreting this analogy. Using data from n=281 participants ages 5 to 55, we show that cooling off does not only apply to the single dimension of randomness. Rather, development resembles an optimization process along multiple dimensions of learning (i.e., reward generalization, uncertainty-directed exploration, and random temperature). What...

Many real-world decisions involving rare events also involve extreme outcomes. Despite this confluence, decisions-from-experience research has focused on the impact of rare but non-extreme outcomes. In those situations, people typically choose as if they underestimate the probability of a rare outcome happening. Separately, people have been shown to overestimate the probability of an extreme outcome happening. Here, for the first time, we examine the confluence of these two competing biases in decisions from experience. In a between-subjects behavioural experiment, we...

The question of how the brain represents reward prediction errors is central to reinforcement learning and adaptive, goal-directed behavior. Previous studies have revealed prediction error representations in multiple electrophysiological signatures, but it remains elusive whether these electrophysiological correlates underlying prediction errors are sensitive to valence (in a signed form) or to salience (in an unsigned form). One possible reason concerns the loose correspondence between objective probability and subjective prediction resulting from the optimistic bias,...

Does gravity affect decision-making? This question comes into sharp focus as plans for interplanetary human space missions solidify. In the framework of Bayesian brain theories, gravity encapsulates a strong prior, anchoring agents to a reference frame via the vestibular system, informing their decisions and possibly their integration of uncertainty. What happens when such a strong prior is altered? We address this question using a self-motion estimation task in a space analog environment under conditions of altered gravity. Two participants were cast as remote drone...

The ability to respond flexibly to an ever-changing environment relies on the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). However, how the OFC associates sensory information with predicted outcomes to enable flexible sensory learning in humans remains elusive. Here, we combine a probabilistic tactile reversal learning task with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how lateral OFC (lOFC) interacts with the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) to guide flexible tactile learning in humans. fMRI results reveal that lOFC and S1 exhibit distinct task-dependent engagement:...

Similar decision-making situations often arise repeatedly, presenting tradeoffs between (i) acquiring new information to facilitate future-related decisions (exploration) and (ii) using existing information to secure expected outcomes (exploitation). Exploration choices have been well characterized in nonsocial contexts, however, choices to explore (or not) in social environments are less well understood. Social environments are of particular interest because a key factor that increases exploration in nonsocial contexts is environmental uncertainty, and the social world...

ADHD is characterized by a difficulty to act in a goal-directed manner. While most environments require a sequence of actions for goal attainment, ADHD was never studied in the context of value-based sequence learning. Here, we made use of current advancements in hierarchical reinforcement-learning algorithms to track the internal value and choice policy of individuals with ADHD performing a three-stage sequence learning task. Specifically, 54 participants (28 ADHD, 26 controls) completed a value-based reinforcement-learning task that allowed us to estimate internal...

Good decisions require information. When people face a situation in which they need to make a choice but know little about the options available, how do they search for information? We present an analysis of over 1,000,000 information-search decisions made by over 2,500 individuals in a decisions-from-experience setting. We found that individuals solve the problem in a smart way, relying on several strategies—including two novel ones. In discovery-driven search, people leverage detailed knowledge about the structure of the environment to find previously unobserved...

Multiple measures of decision-making under uncertainty (e.g. jumping to conclusions (JTC), bias against disconfirmatory evidence (BADE), win-switch behavior, random exploration) have been associated with delusional thinking in independent studies. Yet, it is unknown whether these variables explain shared or unique variance in delusional thinking, and whether these relationships are specific to paranoia or delusional ideation more broadly. Additionally, the underlying computational mechanisms require further investigation. To investigate these questions, task and...

Despite the crucial role of complex temporal sequences, such as speech and music, in our everyday lives, our ability to acquire and reproduce these patterns is prone to various contextual biases. In this study, we examined how the temporal order of auditory sequences affects temporal reproduction. Participants were asked to reproduce accelerating, decelerating or random sequences, each consisting of four intervals, by tapping their fingers. Our results showed that the reproduction and the reproduction variability were influenced by the sequential structure and interval...

Evidence accumulation models have enabled strong advances in our understanding of decision-making, yet their application to examining learning has not been common. Using data from participants completing a dynamic random dot-motion direction discrimination task across four days, we characterized alterations in two components of perceptual decision-making (Drift Diffusion Model drift rate and response boundary). Continuous-time learning models were applied to characterize trajectories of performance change, with different models allowing for varying dynamics. The...

Cognitive distancing is a therapeutic technique commonly used in psychological treatment of various mental health disorders, but its computational mechanisms remain unknown. To determine the effects of cognitive distancing on computational learning mechanisms, we use an online reward decision-making task, combined with reinforcement learning modelling in 935 participants, 49.1% of whom were trained to regulate their emotional response to task performance feedback. Those participants practicing cognitive distancing showed heightened learning from negative events as well...

The U-shaped curve has long been recognized as a fundamental concept in psychological science, particularly in theories about motivational accounts and cognitive control. In this study (N=330), we empirically tested the prediction of a non-monotonic, curvilinear relationship between task difficulty and control adaptation. Drawing from Motivational Intensity Theory (MIT) and the expected value of control (EVC) framework, we hypothesized that control intensity would increase with task difficulty until a maximum tolerable level, after which it would decrease. To...

Symbolic numbers contain information about their relative numerical cardinal magnitude (e.g., 2 < 3) and ordinal placement in the count-list (e.g., 1, 2, 3). Previous research has primarily investigated magnitude discrimination skills and their predictive capacity for math achievement, whereas numerical ordering has been less systematically explored. At approximately 10-12 years of age, numerical order processing skills have been observed to surpass cardinal magnitude discrimination skills as the key predictor of arithmetic ability. The neurocognitive mechanisms...

Previous literature suggests that a balance between Pavlovian and instrumental decision-making systems is critical for optimal decision-making. Pavlovian bias (i.e., approach toward reward-predictive stimuli and avoid punishment-predictive stimuli) often contrasts with the instrumental response. Although recent neuroimaging studies have identified brain regions that may be related to Pavlovian bias, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), it is unclear whether a causal relationship exists. Therefore, we investigated whether upregulation of the dlPFC using...

Expectations can inform fast, accurate decisions. But what informs expectations? Here we test the hypothesis that expectations are set by dynamic inference from memory. Participants performed a cue-guided perceptual decision task with independently-varying memory and sensory evidence. Cues established expectations by reminding participants of past stimulus-stimulus pairings, which predicted the likely target in a subsequent noisy image stream. Participant’s responses used both memory and sensory information, in accordance to their relative reliability. Formal model...

The brain uses temporal structure in the environment, like rhythm in music and speech, to predict the timing of events, thereby optimizing their processing and perception. Temporal expectations can be grounded in different aspects of the input structure, such as a regular beat or a predictable pattern. One influential account posits that a generic mechanism underlies beat-based and pattern-based expectations, namely, entrainment of low-frequency neural oscillations to rhythmic input, whereas other accounts assume different underlying neural mechanisms. Here, we...

To interpret the sensory environment, the brain combines ambiguous sensory measurements with knowledge that reflects context-specific prior experience. But environmental contexts can change abruptly and unpredictably, resulting in uncertainty about the current context. Here we address two questions: how should context-specific prior knowledge optimally guide the interpretation of sensory stimuli in changing environments, and do human decision-making strategies resemble this optimum? We probe these questions with a task in which subjects report the orientation of...

Human behavior emerges from planning over elaborate decompositions of tasks into goals, subgoals, and low-level actions. How are these decompositions created and used? Here, we propose and evaluate a normative framework for task decomposition based on the simple idea that people decompose tasks to reduce the overall cost of planning while maintaining task performance. Analyzing 11,117 distinct graph-structured planning tasks, we find that our framework justifies several existing heuristics for task decomposition and makes predictions that can be distinguished from two...

Stereotyping is a ubiquitous feature of social cognition, yet surprisingly little is known about how group-related beliefs influence the acquisition of person knowledge. Accordingly, in combination with computational modeling (i.e., Reinforcement Learning Drift Diffusion Model analysis), here we used a probabilistic selection task to explore the extent to which gender stereotypes impact instrumental learning. Several theoretically interesting effects were observed. First, reflecting the impact of cultural socialization on person construal, an expectancy-based preference...

A standard assumption in neuroscience is that low-effort model-free learning is automatic and continuously used, whereas more complex model-based strategies are only used when the rewards they generate are worth the additional effort. We present evidence refuting this assumption. First, we demonstrate flaws in previous reports of combined model-free and model-based reward prediction errors in the ventral striatum that probably led to spurious results. More appropriate analyses yield no evidence of model-free prediction errors in this region. Second, we find that task...

The capacity to evaluate logical arguments intuitively is a fundamental assumption of recent dual-process theories. One observation supporting this effect is the standard conflict effect on incongruent arguments under belief instruction. Conflict arguments are evaluated less accurately than non-conflict arguments, arguably because logic is intuitive and automatic enough to interfere with belief judgments. However, recent studies have challenged this interpretation by finding the same conflict effects when a matching heuristic cues the same response as logic, even on...

Language researchers view utterance planning as implicit decision-making: producers must choose the words, sentence structures, and various other linguistic features to communicate their message. To date, much of the research on utterance planning has focused on situations in which the speaker knows the full message to convey. Less is known about circumstances in which speakers begin utterance planning before they are certain about their message. In three picture-naming experiments, we used a novel paradigm to examine how speakers plan utterances before a full message...

When making decisions based on probabilistic outcomes, people guide their behavior using knowledge gathered through both indirect descriptions and direct experience. Paradoxically, how people obtain information significantly impacts apparent preferences. A ubiquitous example is the description-experience gap: individuals seemingly overweight low probability events when probabilities are described yet underweight them when probabilities must be experienced firsthand. A leading explanation for this fundamental gap in decision-making is that probabilities are weighted...

Event boundaries and temporal context shape the organization of episodic memories. We hypothesized that attentional fluctuations during encoding serve as “events” that affect temporal context representations and recall organization. Individuals encoded trial-unique objects during a modified sustained attention task. Memory was tested with free recall. Response time variability during the encoding tasks was used to characterize “in the zone” and “out of the zone” attentional states. We predicted that: 1) “in the zone”, vs. “out of the zone”, attentional states should be...

Aberrant belief updating due to misestimation of uncertainty and an increased perception of the world as volatile (i.e., unstable) has been found in autism and psychotic disorders. Pupil dilation tracks events that warrant belief updating, likely reflecting the adjustment of neural gain. However, whether subclinical autistic or psychotic symptoms affect this adjustment and how they relate to learning in volatile environments remains to be unraveled. We investigated the relationship between behavioral and pupillometric markers of subjective volatility (i.e., experience...

People often quit waiting for delayed rewards when the exact timing of those rewards is uncertain. This behavior often has been attributed to self-control failure. Another possibility is that quitting is the result of a rational decision-making process in the face of uncertainty, based on the decision-maker’s expectations about the possible arrival times of the awaited reward. There are forms of temporal expectations (e.g., heavy-tailed) under which the expected time remaining until a reward arrives actually increases as time elapses. In those cases, the rational...

Metacognition refers to a capacity to reflect on and control other cognitive processes, commonly quantified as the extent to which confidence tracks objective performance. There is conflicting evidence about how “local” metacognition (monitoring of individual judgments) and “global” metacognition (estimates of self-performance) change across the lifespan. Additionally, the degree to which metacognition generalises across cognitive domains may itself change with age due to increased experience with one’s own abilities. Using a gamified suite of performance-controlled...

When seeing a face or hearing a voice, perceivers readily form first impressions of a person’s characteristics-are they trustworthy, do they seem aggressive? One of the key claims about trait impressions from faces and voices alike is that these impressions are formed rapidly. For faces, studies have systematically mapped this rapid time course of trait impressions, finding that they are well formed and stable after approximately 100 ms of exposure. For voices, however, no systematic investigation of the time course of trait perception exists. In the current study,...

During decision making, we are continuously faced with two sources of uncertainty regarding the links between stimuli, our actions, and outcomes. On the one hand, our expectations are often probabilistic, that is, stimuli or actions yield the expected outcome only with a certain probability (expected uncertainty). On the other hand, expectations might become invalid due to sudden, unexpected changes in the environment (unexpected uncertainty). Several lines of research show that pupil-linked brain arousal is a sensitive indirect measure of brain mechanisms underlying...

The modality effect refers to the robust finding that memory performance differs for items presented aurally, as compared with visually. Whereas auditory presentation leads to stronger recency performance in immediate recall, visual presentation often produces better primacy performance (the inverse modality effect). To investigate and model these differences, we conducted two large-scale web-based immediate free recall experiments. In both experiments, participants studied visual and auditory word lists of varying lengths and rates of presentation. We observed typical...

Rapid individual cognitive phenotyping holds the potential to revolutionize domains as wide-ranging as personalized learning, employment practices, and precision psychiatry. Going beyond limitations imposed by traditional lab-based experiments, new efforts have been underway toward greater ecological validity and participant diversity to capture the full range of individual differences in cognitive abilities and behaviors across the general population. Building on this, we developed Skill Lab, a novel game-based tool that simultaneously assesses a broad suite of...

Negative interpretation bias, the tendency to appraise ambiguous stimuli as threatening, shapes our emotional lives. Various laboratory tasks, which differ in stimuli features and task procedures, can quantify negative interpretation bias. However, it is unknown whether these tasks globally predict individual differences in real-world negative (NA) and positive (PA) affect. Across two studies, we tested whether different lab-based negative interpretation bias tasks predict daily NA and PA, measured via mobile phone across months. To quantify negative interpretation...

A controversial claim in recent dual process accounts of reasoning is that intuitive processes not only lead to bias but are also sensitive to the logical status of an argument. The intuitive logic hypothesis draws upon evidence that reasoners take longer and are less confident on belief-logic conflict problems, irrespective of whether they give the correct logical response. In this paper, we examine conflict detection under conditions in which participants are asked to either judge the logical validity or believability of a presented conclusion, accompanied by measures...

In natural settings, people decide not only when to request information, but also which attribute of a situation to inquire about. Little is known about how participants prioritize inquiries about task-relevant features. We show that, in a new task of information demand, participants inefficiently inquired about attributes that had high individual value but were less informative about a total payoff, and these inefficiencies persisted in instrumental conditions in which they entailed significantly lower rewards. Factors contributing to inefficient information demand...

The perception of agency can influence memory when individuals feel their decisions exert control over their environment. While perceived agency has been shown to increase memory for items, most real-life situations are much more complex. Here, we examined how an individual’s agency to influence the outcome of a situation affects their ability to learn associations between items that occur prior to and after a decision is made. In our paradigm, participants were told they were playing a game show where they had to help a trial unique cue, a “contestant,” choose between...

Humans globally are reaping the benefits of longer lives. Yet, longer life spans also require engaging with consequential but often uncertain decisions well into old age. Previous research has yielded mixed findings with regards to life span differences in how individuals make decisions under uncertainty. One factor contributing to the heterogeneity of findings is the diversity of paradigms that cover different aspects of uncertainty and tap into different cognitive and affective mechanisms. In this study, 175 participants (53.14% females, mean age = 44.9 years, SD...

Although in many cases salient stimuli capture attention involuntarily, it has been proposed recently that under certain conditions, the bottom-up signal generated by such stimuli can be proactively suppressed. In support of this signal suppression hypothesis, ERP studies have demonstrated that salient stimuli that do not capture attention elicit a distractor positivity (PD), a putative neural index of suppression. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly clear that regularities across preceding search episodes have a large influence on attentional selection. Yet...

Counterfactual thoughts inherently imply a comparison of a given reality to an alternative state of affairs. Previous research mainly considered consequences of different counterfactual types, namely focus (other vs. self), structure (additive vs. subtractive), and direction (upward vs. downward). The current work investigates whether a ‘more-than’ versus ‘less-than’ comparative nature of counterfactual thoughts alters judgments of their impact. Four experiments demonstrated that self-generated other- (Studies 1 and 3) and self-focused (Study 2) upward counterfactuals...

Although individuals generally avoid negative information, recent research documents that they voluntarily explore negative information to resolve uncertainty. However, it remains unclear (a) whether uncertainty facilitates exploration similarly when exploration is expected to lead to negative, neutral, or positive information, and (b) whether older adults seek negative information to reduce uncertainty like younger adults do. This study addresses the two issues across four experimental studies (N = 407). The results indicate that individuals are more likely to...

The ventromedial prefrontal-cortex (vmPFC) is known to contain expected value signals that inform our choices. But expected values even for the same stimulus can differ by task. In this study, we asked how the brain flexibly switches between such value representations in a task-dependent manner. Thirty-five participants alternated between tasks in which either stimulus color or motion predicted rewards. We show that multivariate vmPFC signals contain a rich representation that includes the current task state or context (motion/color), the associated expected value,...

The gaze cueing effect is the tendency for people to respond faster to targets appearing at locations gazed at by others compared to locations gazed away from by others. The effect is robust, widely studied, and is an influential finding within social cognition. However, much is still unknown about the cognitive processes that drive this effect. Formal evidence accumulation models provide the dominant theoretical account of the cognitive processes underlying speeded decision making but have never been applied to gaze cueing research and rarely to the study of social...

Predictive processing accounts propose that our brain constantly tries to match top-down internal representations with bottom-up incoming information from the environment. Predictions can lead to prediction errors of varying degrees depending on the extent to which the information encountered in the environment conforms with prior expectations. Theoretical and computational models assume that prediction errors have beneficial effects on learning and memory. However, while there is strong evidence on the effects of prediction error on learning, relatively less evidence...

Nearly all tasks of daily life involve skilled object manipulation, and successful manipulation requires knowledge of object dynamics. We recently developed a motor learning paradigm that reveals the categorical organization of motor memories of object dynamics. When participants repeatedly lift a constant-density “family” of cylindrical objects that vary in size, and then an outlier object with a greater density is interleaved into the sequence of lifts, they often fail to learn the weight of the outlier, persistently treating it as a family member despite repeated...

Depression is believed to hinder one’s ability to reason about oneself (metacognition). This impairment can arise from dysfunctional biases and/or learning processes. However, the relationship between depression, biases and learning in metacognition is not known. Here we combined multi-trial behavioural experiments with computa- tional modelling to explicitly test whether depression impacts biases and/or learning in a metacognitive task. First, using a perceptual estimation task with fixed feedback valence (N=131), we show that depressive symptoms predict...

This study traced different types of distractor effects in the picture-word interference (PWI) task across repeated naming. Starting point was a PWI study by Kurtz et al. (2018). It reported that naming a picture (e.g., of a duck) was slowed down by a distractor word phonologically related to an alternative picture name from a different taxonomic level (“birch” related to “bird”) when compared to an unrelated control, indicating that the alternative name was (phonologically) coactivated. Importantly, the effect was stable across repeated naming. The authors argued that...

Individuals with anxiety and depression exhibit chronic metacognitive biases such as underconfidence. The origin of such biases is unknown. Here we quantified the impact of feedback valence on confidence in two large general population samples (N=230 and N=278). We studied metacognition both locally, as confidence in individual task instances, and globally, as longer run self-performance estimates. Global confidence was sensitive to both local confidence and feedback valence – more frequent positive (negative) feedback increased (respectively decreased) global...