Oversampling of minority categories drives misperceptions of group compositions.

The ability to estimate proportions informs our immediate impressions of social environments (e.g., of the diversity of races or genders within a crowded room).

Individual differences in the perception of probability.

In recent studies of humans estimating non-stationary probabilities, estimates appear to be unbiased on average, across the full range of probability values to be estimated. This finding is surprising given that experiments measuring probability estimation in other contexts have often identified conservatism: individuals tend to overestimate low probability events and underestimate high probability events. In other contexts, repulsive biases have also been documented, with individuals producing judgments that tend toward extreme values instead.

Uncertainty-based overestimation in the perception of group actions.

Individuals are adept at estimating average properties of group visual stimuli, even following brief presentations. In estimating the directional heading of walking human figures, judgments are biased in a peculiar manner: groups facing intermediate directions are perceived to be more leftward- or rightward-facing than actual averages. This effect was previously explained as a repulsive bias away from a central category boundary; groups along this boundary (directly facing the observer) are estimated with lower variability and with relatively greater accuracy.

Speed of person perception affects immediate and ongoing aesthetic evaluation.

Recent studies have shed light on how aesthetic judgments are formed following presentations lasting less than a second. Meanwhile, dedicated neural mechanisms are understood to enable the rapid detection of human faces, bodies, and actions. On the basis of cognitive studies of: (i) the speed and acuity of person perception, and (ii) preferential attention given to human imagery (e.

Temporal Discounting and Search Habits: Evidence for a Task-Dependent Relationship.

Recent experiments suggest that search direction causally affects the discounted valuation of delayed payoffs. Comparisons between options can increase individuals' patience toward future payoff options, while searching within options instead promotes impatient choices. We further test the robustness and specificity of this relationship using a novel choice task.

Continuous aesthetic judgment of image sequences.

Perceptual judgments are said to be reference-dependent as they change on the basis of recent experiences. Here we quantify sequence effects within two types of aesthetic judgments: (i) individual ratings of single images (during self-paced trials) and (ii) continuous ratings of image sequences. As in the case of known contrast effects, trial-by-trial aesthetic responses are negatively correlated with judgments made toward the preceding image.

Normalized value coding explains dynamic adaptation in the human valuation process.

The notion of subjective value is central to choice theories in ecology, economics, and psychology, serving as an integrated decision variable by which options are compared. Subjective value is often assumed to be an absolute quantity, determined in a static manner by the properties of an individual option. Recent neurobiological studies, however, have shown that neural value coding dynamically adapts to the statistics of the recent reward environment, introducing an intrinsic temporal context dependence into the neural representation of value.

Forecasting the outcome of a time-varying Bernoulli process: Data from a laboratory experiment.

The data presented in this article are related to the research article entitled "Discrete Adjustment to a Changing Environment: Experimental Evidence" (Khaw et al., 2017) [1]. We present data from a laboratory experiment that asks subjects to forecast the outcome of a time-varying Bernoulli process.

Reminders of past choices bias decisions for reward in humans.

We provide evidence that decisions are made by consulting memories for individual past experiences, and that this process can be biased in favour of past choices using incidental reminders. First, in a standard rewarded choice task, we show that a model that estimates value at decision-time using individual samples of past outcomes fits choices and decision-related neural activity better than a canonical incremental learning model. In a second experiment, we bias this sampling process by incidentally reminding participants of individual past decisions.

The Measurement of Subjective Value and Its Relation to Contingent Valuation and Environmental Public Goods.

Environmental public goods--including national parks, clean air/water, and ecosystem services--provide substantial benefits on a global scale. These goods have unique characteristics in that they are typically "nonmarket" goods, with values from both use and passive use that accrue to a large number of individuals both in current and future generations. In this study, we test the hypothesis that neural signals in areas correlated with subjective valuations for essentially all other previously studied categories of goods (ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum) also correlate with environmental valuations.

Normalization is a general neural mechanism for context-dependent decision making.

Understanding the neural code is critical to linking brain and behavior. In sensory systems, divisive normalization seems to be a canonical neural computation, observed in areas ranging from retina to cortex and mediating processes including contrast adaptation, surround suppression, visual attention, and multisensory integration. Recent electrophysiological studies have extended these insights beyond the sensory domain, demonstrating an analogous algorithm for the value signals that guide decision making, but the effects of normalization on choice behavior are unknown.

Decoding the role of the insula in human cognition: functional parcellation and large-scale reverse inference.

Recent work has indicated that the insula may be involved in goal-directed cognition, switching between networks, and the conscious awareness of affect and somatosensation. However, these findings have been limited by the insula's remarkably high base rate of activation and considerable functional heterogeneity. The present study used a relatively unbiased data-driven approach combining resting-state connectivity-based parcellation of the insula with large-scale meta-analysis to understand how the insula is anatomically organized based on functional connectivity patterns as well as the consistency and specificity of the associated cognitive functions.