Our Brain Uses Statistics To Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions
By Medical Express, June 22, 2016
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This post has been viewed 3,182 times.
According to a new study published in NEURON, human brains are constantly processing data to make statistical assessments that translate into the feeling we call confidence. “The feeling ultimately relies on the same statistical computations a computer would make,” says Professor Adam Kepecs, a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and lead author of the new study. In experiments with human subjects, Kepecs and colleagues tried to control for different factors that can vary from person to person and establish what evidence contributed to each decision. To meet this goal, Kepecs and graduate student Joshua Sanders created video games to compare human and computer performance. They had human volunteers listen to streams of clicking sounds and determine which clicks were faster. Participants rated confidence in each choice on a scale of one (a random guess) to five (high confidence). Kepecs and his colleagues found that human responses were similar to statistical calculations. The brain produces feelings of confidence that inform decisions the same way statistics pulls patterns out of noisy data. At the same time, Kepecs says it’s likely that the statistical computation his research reveals probably provides only an initial estimate for human decision-makers. “Human confidence reports are not equivalent to this computation,” he says. “In the experiments we conducted, they mirror this computation, and we suspect that in more complex situations they will be the point of departure for a confidence report.” Kepecs plans to use his model of confidence as a foothold for finding the seat of confidence in the brain and understanding its neural circuitry.
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