Do humans make good decisions?

Human performance on perceptual classification tasks approaches that of an ideal observer, but economic decisions are often inconsistent and intransitive, with preferences reversing according to the local context. We discuss the view that suboptimal choices may result from the efficient coding of de...

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Príomhchruthaitheoirí: Summerfield, C, Tsetsos, K
Formáid: Journal article
Teanga:English
Foilsithe / Cruthaithe: Elsevier 2015
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author Summerfield, C
Tsetsos, K
author_facet Summerfield, C
Tsetsos, K
author_sort Summerfield, C
collection OXFORD
description Human performance on perceptual classification tasks approaches that of an ideal observer, but economic decisions are often inconsistent and intransitive, with preferences reversing according to the local context. We discuss the view that suboptimal choices may result from the efficient coding of decision-relevant information, a strategy that allows expected inputs to be processed with higher gain than unexpected inputs. Efficient coding leads to 'robust' decisions that depart from optimality but maximise the information transmitted by a limited-capacity system in a rapidly-changing world. We review recent work showing that when perceptual environments are variable or volatile, perceptual decisions exhibit the same suboptimal context-dependence as economic choices, and we propose a general computational framework that accounts for findings across the two domains.
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spelling oxford-uuid:44ca7b4c-7a2c-43e7-a4e7-d0c3260507572022-03-26T15:03:47ZDo humans make good decisions?Journal articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_dcae04bcuuid:44ca7b4c-7a2c-43e7-a4e7-d0c326050757EnglishSymplectic Elements at OxfordElsevier2015Summerfield, CTsetsos, KHuman performance on perceptual classification tasks approaches that of an ideal observer, but economic decisions are often inconsistent and intransitive, with preferences reversing according to the local context. We discuss the view that suboptimal choices may result from the efficient coding of decision-relevant information, a strategy that allows expected inputs to be processed with higher gain than unexpected inputs. Efficient coding leads to 'robust' decisions that depart from optimality but maximise the information transmitted by a limited-capacity system in a rapidly-changing world. We review recent work showing that when perceptual environments are variable or volatile, perceptual decisions exhibit the same suboptimal context-dependence as economic choices, and we propose a general computational framework that accounts for findings across the two domains.
spellingShingle Summerfield, C
Tsetsos, K
Do humans make good decisions?
title Do humans make good decisions?
title_full Do humans make good decisions?
title_fullStr Do humans make good decisions?
title_full_unstemmed Do humans make good decisions?
title_short Do humans make good decisions?
title_sort do humans make good decisions
work_keys_str_mv AT summerfieldc dohumansmakegooddecisions
AT tsetsosk dohumansmakegooddecisions