Isomorphic decisional biases across perceptual tasks

Humans adjust their behavioral strategies to maximize rewards. However, in the laboratory, human decisional biases exist and persist in two alternative tasks, even when this behavior leads to a loss in utilities. Such biases constitute the tendency to choose one action over others and emerge from a combination of external and internal factors that are specific for each individual. Here, we explored the idea that internally-mediated decisional biases should stably occur and, hence, be reflected across multiple behavioral tasks. Our experimental results confirm this notion and illustrate how participants exhibited similar choice biases across days and tasks. Moreover, we show how side-choice behavior in a two alternative choice task served to identify participants, suggesting that individual traits could underlie these choice biases. The tasks and analytic tools developed for this study should become instrumental in exploring the interaction between internal and external factors that contribute to decisional biases. They could also serve to detect psychopathologies that involve aberrant levels of choice variability.

Automated summary

The study reveals that humans exhibit decisional biases even in laboratory settings, leading to loss in utilities. These biases may be caused by individual traits and are reflected consistently across multiple behavioral tasks and days. This suggests that internal factors play a key role in shaping decision-making biases, which could be instrumental in detecting psychopathologies involving abnormal levels of choice variability.