Response Bias Reflects Individual Differences in Sensory Encoding
研究发现，即使在简单的二选一任务中，人的反应偏差也部分源于感觉编码的个体差异：若某类刺激的内部证据变异性更高，最优反应会偏向另一类。
Humans exhibit substantial biases in their decision making even in simple two-choice tasks, but the origin of these biases remains unclear. I hypothesized that one source of bias could be individual differences in sensory encoding. Specifically, if one stimulus category gives rise to an internal-evidence distribution with higher variability, then responses should optimally be biased against that stimulus category. Therefore, response bias may reflect a previously unappreciated subject-to-subject difference in the variance of the internal-evidence distributions. I tested this possibility by analyzing data from three different two-choice tasks ( ns = 443, 443, and 498). For all three tasks, response bias moved in the direction of the optimal criterion determined by each subject’s idiosyncratic internal-evidence variability. These results demonstrate that seemingly random variations in response bias can be driven by individual differences in sensory encoding and are thus partly explained by normative strategies.