期刊
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
卷 113, 期 11, 页码 3102-3107出版社
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1519157113
关键词
decision making; irrationality; choice optimality; selective integration; evidence accumulation
资金
- British Academy/Leverhulme Trust award
- European Research Council (ERC)
- Economic and Social Research Council
- Research Councils UK
- Leverhulme Trust awards
- German-Israeli Science Foundation grant
- Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship
- ERC
- ESRC [ES/K002201/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Economic and Social Research Council [ES/K002201/1] Funding Source: researchfish
According to normative theories, reward-maximizing agents should have consistent preferences. Thus, when faced with alternatives A, B, and C, an individual preferring A to B and B to C should prefer A to C. However, it has been widely argued that humans can incur losses by violating this axiom of transitivity, despite strong evolutionary pressure for reward-maximizing choices. Here, adopting a biologically plausible computational framework, we show that intransitive (and thus economically irrational) choices paradoxically improve accuracy ( and subsequent economic rewards) when decision formation is corrupted by internal neural noise. Over three experiments, we show that humans accumulate evidence over time using a selective integration policy that discards information about alternatives with momentarily lower value. This policy predicts violations of the axiom of transitivity when three equally valued alternatives differ circularly in their number of winning samples. We confirm this prediction in a fourth experiment reporting significant violations of weak stochastic transitivity in human observers. Crucially, we show that relying on selective integration protects choices against late noise that otherwise corrupts decision formation beyond the sensory stage. Indeed, we report that individuals with higher late noise relied more strongly on selective integration. These findings suggest that violations of rational choice theory reflect adaptive computations that have evolved in response to irreducible noise during neural information processing.
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