Publicação
Weber's law and movement-correlates of decision confidence in human decision making
| Resumo: | Every day we collect information through our senses and use that information to make decisions. Thus, understanding how this sensory information is used to guide our behavior becomes extremely relevant, as perceptual decision-making is a central ability of human and animal behavior. In particular, this work was dedicated to the study of two regularities observed in animal behavior in a context of sensory decision, promoting its extension to human behavior. The first, called TIED - time-intensity equivalence in discrimination - describes how reaction times involved in sensory intensity discrimination change as a function of the overall magnitude of the stimuli being discriminated. The identification of TIED in an experiment developed in rodents allowed to determine the specificities of a mechanism capable of justifying Weber’s Law - old psychophysical regularity of the discrimination process. In this work, an adaptation of this experiment was carried out promoting the identification of TIED in human perception, thus extending not only its generality but allowing to determine an underlying mathematical mechanism for sensory discrimination. The second behavior pattern studied in this work is the modulation of the speed used to indicate the response of a sensory decision. In particular, the identification of the movement’s speed - vigor - as a function of sensory strength of evidence follows the same pattern as the level of confidence in a decision found by works dedicated to its study. In this way, a second human behavioral experiment was developed exposing a direct relationship between response movement speed and the level of confidence in the decision. Recent works devoted to the study of vigor in a decision-making context have exposed a relationship between vigor and the value of the reward obtained per unit of time - average reward rate - through the way it determines the computation of cost of time. Therefore, in this experiment a variable reward system and a discount protocol were also included. The purpose of this integration would be to understand how decision confidence, given its implicit relationship with vigor, is integrated into this suggested computation between reward, cost of time, and vigor. |
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| Autores principais: | Damião, Íris Isabel Coimbra |
| Assunto: | TIED Lei de Weber Vigor Confiança Recompensa Custo do tempo Teses de mestrado - 2020 |
| Ano: | 2020 |
| País: | Portugal |
| Tipo de documento: | dissertação de mestrado |
| Tipo de acesso: | acesso aberto |
| Instituição associada: | Universidade de Lisboa |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| Origem: | Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa |
| Resumo: | Every day we collect information through our senses and use that information to make decisions. Thus, understanding how this sensory information is used to guide our behavior becomes extremely relevant, as perceptual decision-making is a central ability of human and animal behavior. In particular, this work was dedicated to the study of two regularities observed in animal behavior in a context of sensory decision, promoting its extension to human behavior. The first, called TIED - time-intensity equivalence in discrimination - describes how reaction times involved in sensory intensity discrimination change as a function of the overall magnitude of the stimuli being discriminated. The identification of TIED in an experiment developed in rodents allowed to determine the specificities of a mechanism capable of justifying Weber’s Law - old psychophysical regularity of the discrimination process. In this work, an adaptation of this experiment was carried out promoting the identification of TIED in human perception, thus extending not only its generality but allowing to determine an underlying mathematical mechanism for sensory discrimination. The second behavior pattern studied in this work is the modulation of the speed used to indicate the response of a sensory decision. In particular, the identification of the movement’s speed - vigor - as a function of sensory strength of evidence follows the same pattern as the level of confidence in a decision found by works dedicated to its study. In this way, a second human behavioral experiment was developed exposing a direct relationship between response movement speed and the level of confidence in the decision. Recent works devoted to the study of vigor in a decision-making context have exposed a relationship between vigor and the value of the reward obtained per unit of time - average reward rate - through the way it determines the computation of cost of time. Therefore, in this experiment a variable reward system and a discount protocol were also included. The purpose of this integration would be to understand how decision confidence, given its implicit relationship with vigor, is integrated into this suggested computation between reward, cost of time, and vigor. |
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