An uncertainty-based model of the effects of fixation on choice

Zhi-Wei Li and Wei Ji Ma

PLOS Computational Biology, 2021, vol. 17, issue 8, 1-17

Abstract: When people view a consumable item for a longer amount of time, they choose it more frequently; this also seems to be the direction of causality. The leading model of this effect is a drift-diffusion model with a fixation-based attentional bias. Here, we propose an explicitly Bayesian account for the same data. This account is based on the notion that the brain builds a posterior belief over the value of an item in the same way it would over a sensory variable. As the agent gathers evidence about the item from sensory observations and from retrieved memories, the posterior distribution narrows. We further postulate that the utility of an item is a weighted sum of the posterior mean and the negative posterior standard deviation, with the latter accounting for risk aversion. Fixating for longer can increase or decrease the posterior mean, but will inevitably lower the posterior standard deviation. This model fits the data better than the original attentional drift-diffusion model but worse than a variant with a collapsing bound. We discuss the often overlooked technical challenges in fitting models simultaneously to choice and response time data in the absence of an analytical expression. Our results hopefully contribute to emerging accounts of valuation as an inference process.Author summary: When people look longer at a food item, they tend to like it more. We propose a new theory in which this occurs because looking gathers information that reduces uncertainty, and people are uncertainty averse. We turn the theory into a mathematical model and fit it to previously published data. It fits better than the leading model, although we also find that the leading model can be improved.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009190 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article/fil ... 09190&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pcbi00:1009190

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009190

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS Computational Biology from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ploscompbiol ().