Sequential effects: Superstition or rational behavior?

Angela J. Yu, Jonathan D. Cohen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

184 Scopus citations

Abstract

In a variety of behavioral tasks, subjects exhibit an automatic and apparently suboptimal sequential effect: they respond more rapidly and accurately to a stimulus if it reinforces a local pattern in stimulus history, such as a string of repetitions or alternations, compared to when it violates such a pattern. This is often the case even if the local trends arise by chance in the context of a randomized design, such that stimulus history has no real predictive power. In this work, we use a normative Bayesian framework to examine the hypothesis that such idiosyncrasies may reflect the inadvertent engagement of mechanisms critical for adapting to a changing environment. We show that prior belief in non-stationarity can induce experimentally observed sequential effects in an otherwise Bayes-optimal algorithm. The Bayesian algorithm is shown to be well approximated by linear-exponential filtering of past observations, a feature also apparent in the behavioral data. We derive an explicit relationship between the parameters and computations of the exact Bayesian algorithm and those of the approximate linear-exponential filter. Since the latter is equivalent to a leaky-integration process, a commonly used model of neuronal dynamics underlying perceptual decision-making and trial-to-trial dependencies, our model provides a principled account of why such dynamics are useful. We also show that parameter-tuning of the leaky-integration process is possible, using stochastic gradient descent based only on the noisy binary inputs. This is a proof of concept that not only can neurons implement near-optimal prediction based on standard neuronal dynamics, but that they can also learn to tune the processing parameters without explicitly representing probabilities.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems 21 - Proceedings of the 2008 Conference
PublisherNeural Information Processing Systems
Pages1873-1880
Number of pages8
ISBN (Print)9781605609492
StatePublished - 2009
Event22nd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NIPS 2008 - Vancouver, BC, Canada
Duration: Dec 8 2008Dec 11 2008

Publication series

NameAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems 21 - Proceedings of the 2008 Conference

Other

Other22nd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NIPS 2008
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVancouver, BC
Period12/8/0812/11/08

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Information Systems

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