Choice Blindness and Preference Change: You Will Like This Paper Better If You (Believe You) Chose to Read It!

Value construction through sequential sampling explains serial dependencies in decision making

Deciding between a pair of familiar items is thought to rely on a comparison of their subjective values. When the values are similar, decisions take longer, and the choice may be inconsistent with stated value. These regularities are thought to be explained by the same mechanism of noisy evidence accumulation that leads to perceptual errors under conditions of low signal to noise. However, unlike perceptual decisions, subjective values may vary with internal states (e.g. desires, priorities) that change over time. This raises the possibility that the apparent stochasticity of choice reflects changes in value rather than mere noise. We hypothesized that these changes would manifest in serial dependencies across decision sequences. We analyzed data from a task in which participants chose between snack items. We developed an algorithm, Reval, that revealed significant fluctuations of the subjective values of items within an experimental session. The dynamic values predicted choices and response times more accurately than stated values. The dynamic values also furnished a superior account of the BOLD signal in ventromedial prefrontal cortex. A novel bounded-evidence accumulation model with temporally correlated evidence samples supports the idea that revaluation reflects the dynamic construction of subjective value during deliberation, which in turn influences subsequent decisions.

Value construction through sequential sampling explains serial dependencies in decision making

Many decisions are expressed as a preference for one item over another. When these items are familiar, it is often assumed that the decision maker assigns a value to each of the items and chooses the item with the highest value. These values may be imperfectly recalled, but are assumed to be stable over the course of an interview or psychological experiment. Choices that are inconsistent with a stated valuation are thought to occur because of unspecified noise that corrupts the neural representation of value. Assuming that the noise is uncorrelated over time, the pattern of choices and response times in value-based decisions are modeled within the framework of Bounded Evidence Accumulation (BEA), similar to that used in perceptual decision-making. In BEA, noisy evidence samples accumulate over time until the accumulated evidence for one of the options reaches a threshold. Here, we argue that the assumption of temporally uncorrelated noise, while reasonable for perceptual decisions, is not reasonable for value-based decisions. Subjective values depend on the internal state of the decision maker, including their desires, needs, priorities, attentional state, and goals. These internal states may change over time, or undergo revaluation, as will the subjective values. We reasoned that these hypothetical value changes should be detectable in the pattern of choices made over a sequence of decisions. We reanalyzed data from a well-studied task in which participants were presented with pairs of snacks and asked to choose the one they preferred. Using a novel algorithm (Reval), we show that the subjective value of the items changes significantly during a short experimental session (about 1 hour). Values derived with Reval explain choice and response time better than explicitly stated values. They also better explain the BOLD signal in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, known to represent the value of decision alternatives. Revaluation is also observed in a BEA model in which successive evidence samples are not assumed to be independent. We argue that revaluation is a consequence of the process by which values are constructed during deliberation to resolve preference choices.

Do adolescents use choice to learn about their preferences? Development of value refinement and its associations with depressive symptoms in adolescence

Independent decision making requires forming stable estimates of one's preferences. We assessed whether adolescents learn about their preferences through choice deliberation and whether depressive symptoms disrupt this process. Adolescents aged 11-18 (N = 214; participated 2021-22; Female: 53.9%; White/Black/Asian/Mixed/Arab or Latin American: 26/21/19/9/8%) rated multiple activities, chose between pairs of activities and re-rated those activities. As expected, overall, participants uprated chosen and downrated unchosen activities (dz = .20). This value refinement through choice was not evident in younger participants but emerged across adolescence. Contrary to our predictions, depressive symptoms were associated with greater value refinement. Despite this, more depressed adolescents reported lower value certainty and choice confidence. The cognitive processes through which choice deliberation shapes preference develop over adolescence, and are disrupted in depression.

Biases in bioethics: a narrative review

Given that biases can distort bioethics work, it has received surprisingly little and fragmented attention compared to in other fields of research. This article provides an overview of potentially relevant biases in bioethics, such as cognitive biases, affective biases, imperatives, and moral biases. Special attention is given to moral biases, which are discussed in terms of (1) Framings, (2) Moral theory bias, (3) Analysis bias, (4) Argumentation bias, and (5) Decision bias. While the overview is not exhaustive and the taxonomy by no means is absolute, it provides initial guidance with respect to assessing the relevance of various biases for specific kinds of bioethics work. One reason why we should identify and address biases in bioethics is that it can help us assess and improve the quality of bioethics work.

Reducing Choice-Blindness? An Experimental Study Comparing Experienced Meditators to Non-Meditators

The mindfulness trait is an intrinsic characteristic of one's disposition that facilitates awareness of the present moment. Meditation has proven to enhance situational awareness. In this study, we compared the performance of participants that were split into two groups depending on their experience in mindfulness meditation (a control group naive to mindfulness meditation and a group of experienced mindfulness meditators). Choice-blindness happens when people fail to notice mismatches between their intentions and the consequences of decisions. Our task consisted of decisions where participants chose one preferred female facial image from a pair of images for a total of 15 decisions. By reversing the decisions, unbeknownst to the participants, three discrepancies were introduced in an online experimental design. Our results indicate that the likelihood of detecting one or more manipulations was higher in the mindful group compared to the control group. The higher FMI scores of the mindful group did not contribute to this observation; only the practice of mindfulness meditation itself did. Thus, this could be explained by better introspective access and control of reasoning processes acquired during practice and not by the latent characteristics that are attributed to the mindfulness trait.

The value of confidence: Confidence prediction errors drive value-based learning in the absence of external feedback

Reinforcement learning algorithms have a long-standing success story in explaining the dynamics of instrumental conditioning in humans and other species. While normative reinforcement learning models are critically dependent on external feedback, recent findings in the field of perceptual learning point to a crucial role of internally generated reinforcement signals based on subjective confidence, when external feedback is not available. Here, we investigated the existence of such confidence-based learning signals in a key domain of reinforcement-based learning: instrumental conditioning. We conducted a value-based decision making experiment which included phases with and without external feedback and in which participants reported their confidence in addition to choices. Behaviorally, we found signatures of self-reinforcement in phases without feedback, reflected in an increase of subjective confidence and choice consistency. To clarify the mechanistic role of confidence in value-based learning, we compared a family of confidence-based learning models with more standard models predicting either no change in value estimates or a devaluation over time when no external reward is provided. We found that confidence-based models indeed outperformed these reference models, whereby the learning signal of the winning model was based on the prediction error between current confidence and a stimulus-unspecific average of previous confidence levels. Interestingly, individuals with more volatile reward-based value updates in the presence of feedback also showed more volatile confidence-based value updates when feedback was not available. Together, our results provide evidence that confidence-based learning signals affect instrumentally learned subjective values in the absence of external feedback.

Reinforcement learning models successfully simulate value-based learning processes (e.g., “How worthwhile is it to choose the same option again?”) when external reward feedback is provided (e.g., drops of sweet liquids or money). But does learning stagnate if such feedback is no longer provided? Recently, a number of studies have shown that subjective confidence can likewise act as an internal reward signal, when external feedback is not available. These results are in line with the intuitive experience that being confident about choices and actions comes with a satisfying feeling of accomplishment. To better understand the role of confidence in value-based learning, we designed a study in which participants had to learn the value of choice options in phases with and without external feedback. Behaviorally, we found signatures of self-reinforcement, such as increased confidence and choice consistency, in phases without feedback. To examine the underlying mechanisms, we compared computational models, in which learning was guided by confidence signals, with more standard reinforcement learning models. A statistical comparison of these models showed that a confidence-based model in which generic confidence prediction errors (e.g., “Am I as confident as expected?”) guide learning indeed outperformed the standard models.

Enhanced Instructed Fear Learning in Delusion-Proneness

Psychosis is associated with distorted perceptions and deficient bottom-up learning such as classical fear conditioning. This has been interpreted as reflecting imprecise priors in low-level predictive coding systems. Paradoxically, overly strong beliefs, such as overvalued beliefs and delusions, are also present in psychosis-associated states. In line with this, research has suggested that patients with psychosis and associated phenotypes rely more on high-order priors to interpret perceptual input. In this behavioural and fMRI study we studied two types of fear learning, i.e., instructed fear learning mediated by verbal suggestions about fear contingencies and classical fear conditioning mediated by low level associative learning, in delusion proneness-a trait in healthy individuals linked to psychotic disorders. Subjects were shown four faces out of which two were coupled with an aversive stimulation (CS+) while two were not (CS-) in a fear conditioning procedure. Before the conditioning, subjects were informed about the contingencies for two of the faces of each type, while no information was given for the two other faces. We could thereby study the effect of both classical fear conditioning and instructed fear learning. Our main outcome variable was evaluative rating of the faces. Simultaneously, fMRI-measurements were performed to study underlying mechanisms. We postulated that instructed fear learning, measured with evaluative ratings, is stronger in psychosis-related phenotypes, in contrast to classical fear conditioning that has repeatedly been shown to be weaker in these groups. In line with our hypothesis, we observed significantly larger instructed fear learning on a behavioural level in delusion-prone individuals (n = 20) compared to non-delusion-prone subjects (n = 23; n = 20 in fMRI study). Instructed fear learning was associated with a bilateral activation of lateral orbitofrontal cortex that did not differ significantly between groups. However, delusion-prone subjects showed a stronger functional connectivity between right lateral orbitofrontal cortex and regions processing fear and pain. Our results suggest that psychosis-related states are associated with a strong instructed fear learning in addition to previously reported weak classical fear conditioning. Given the similarity between nocebo paradigms and instructed fear learning, our results also have an impact on understanding why nocebo effects differ between individuals.

Resistance to Extinction of Evaluative Fear Conditioning in Delusion Proneness

Delusional beliefs consist of strong priors characterized by resistance to change even when evidence supporting another view is overwhelming. Such bias against disconfirmatory evidence (BADE) has been experimentally demonstrated in patients with psychosis as well as in delusion proneness. In this fMRI-study, we tested for similar resistance to change and associated brain processes in extinction of fear learning, involving a well-described mechanism dependent of evidence updating. A social fear conditioning paradigm was used in which four faces had either been coupled to an unconditioned aversive stimulus (CS+) or not (CS-). For two of the faces, instructions had been given about the fear contingencies (iCS+/iCS-) while for two other faces no such instructions had been given (niCS+/niCS-). Interaction analysis suggested that individuals who score high on delusion-proneness (hDP; n = 20) displayed less extinction of evaluative fear compared to those with low delusion proneness (lDP; n = 23; n = 19 in fMRI-analysis) for non-instructed faces (F = 5.469, P = .024). The resistance to extinction was supported by a difference in extinction related activity between the two groups in medial prefrontal cortex and its connectivity with amygdala, as well as in a cortical network supporting fear processing. For instructed faces no extinction was noted, but there was a larger evaluative fear (F = 5.048, P = 0.03) and an increased functional connectivity between lateral orbitofrontal cortex and fear processing regions for hDP than lDP. Our study links previous explored BADE-effects in delusion associated phenotypes to fear extinction, and suggest that effects of instructions on evaluative fear learning are more pronounced in delusion prone subjects.

Does choice change preferences? An incentivized test of the mere choice effect

Widespread evidence from psychology and neuroscience documents that previous choices unconditionally increase the later desirability of chosen objects, even if those choices were uninformative. This is problematic for economists who use choice data to estimate latent preferences, demand functions, and social welfare. The evidence on this mere choice effect, however, exhibits serious shortcomings which prevent evaluating its possible relevance for economics. In this paper, we present a novel, parsimonious experimental design to test for the economic validity of the mere choice effect addressing these shortcomings. Our design uses well-defined, monetary lotteries, all decisions are incentivized, and we effectively randomize participants' initial choices without relying on deception. Results from a large, pre-registered online experiment find no support for the mere choice effect. Our results challenge conventional wisdom outside economics. The mere choice effect does not seem to be a concern for economics, at least in the domain of decision making under risk.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10683-021-09728-5.

Inference and preference in intertemporal choice

When choosing between immediate and future rewards, how do people deal with uncertainty about the value of the future outcome or the delay until its occurrence? Skylark et al. (2020) suggested that people employ a delay-reward heuristic: the inferred value of an ambiguous future reward is a function of the stated delay, and vice-versa. The present paper investigates the role of this heuristic in choice behaviour. In Studies 1a–2b, participants inferred the value of an ambiguous future reward or delay before the true value was revealed and a choice made. Preference for the future option was predicted by the discrepancy between the estimated and true values: the more pleasantly surprising the delayed option, the greater the willingness to choose it. Studies 3a–3c examined the association between inference and preference when the ambiguous values remained unknown. As predicted by the use of a delay-reward heuristic, inferred delays and rewards were positively related to stated rewards and delays, respectively. More importantly, choices were associated with inferred rewards and, in some circumstances, delays. Critically, estimates and choices were both order-dependent: when estimates preceded choices, estimates were more optimistic (people inferred smaller delays and larger rewards) and were subsequently more likely to choose the delayed option than when choices were made before estimates. These order effects argue against a simple model in which people deal with ambiguity by first estimating the unknown value and then using their estimate as the basis for decision. Rather, it seems that inferences are partly constructed from choices, and the role of inference in choice depends on whether an explicit estimate is made prior to choosing. Finally, we also find that inferences about ambiguous delays depend on whether the estimate has to be made in “days” or in a self-selected temporal unit, and replicate previous findings that older participants make more pessimistic inferences than younger ones. We discuss the implications and possible mechanisms for these findings.

When Not Choosing Leads to Not Liking: Choice-Induced Preference in Infancy

The question of how people's preferences are shaped by their choices has generated decades of research. In a classic example, work on cognitive dissonance has found that observers who must choose between two equally attractive options subsequently avoid the unchosen option, suggesting that not choosing the item led them to like it less. However, almost all of the research on such choice-induced preference focuses on adults, leaving open the question of how much experience is necessary for its emergence. Here, we examined the developmental roots of this phenomenon in preverbal infants (N = 189). In a series of seven experiments using a free-choice paradigm, we found that infants experienced choice-induced preference change similar to adults'. Infants' choice patterns reflected genuine preference change and not attraction to novelty or inherent attitudes toward the options. Hence, choice shapes preferences-even without extensive experience making decisions and without a well-developed self-concept.

Trust in artificial intelligence for medical diagnoses

We present two online experiments investigating trust in artificial intelligence (AI) as a primary and secondary medical diagnosis tool and one experiment testing two methods to increase trust in AI. Participants in Experiment 1 read hypothetical scenarios of low and high-risk diseases, followed by two sequential diagnoses, and estimated their trust in the medical findings. In three between-participants groups, the first and second diagnoses were given by: human and AI, AI and human, and human and human doctors, respectively. In Experiment 2 we examined if people expected higher standards of performance from AI than human doctors, in order to trust AI treatment recommendations. In Experiment 3 we investigated the possibility to increase trust in AI diagnoses by: (i) informing our participants that the AI outperforms the human doctor, and (ii) nudging them to prefer AI diagnoses in a choice between AI and human doctors. Results indicate overall lower trust in AI, as well as for diagnoses of high-risk diseases. Participants trusted AI doctors less than humans for first diagnoses, and they were also less likely to trust a second opinion from an AI doctor for high risk diseases. Surprisingly, results highlight that people have comparable standards of performance for AI and human doctors and that trust in AI does not increase when people are told the AI outperforms the human doctor. Importantly, we find that the gap in trust between AI and human diagnoses is eliminated when people are nudged to select AI in a free-choice paradigm between human and AI diagnoses, with trust for AI diagnoses significantly increased when participants could choose their doctor. These findings isolate control over one's medical practitioner as a valid candidate for future trust-related medical diagnosis and highlight a solid potential path to smooth acceptance of AI diagnoses amongst patients.

Rationalization enables cooperation and cultural evolution

Cushman argues that the function of rationalization is to attribute mental representations to ourselves, thereby making these representations available for future planning. I argue that such attribution is often not necessary and sometimes maladaptive. I suggest a different explanation of rationalization: making representations available to other agents, to facilitate cooperation, transmission, and the ratchet effect that underlies cumulative cultural evolution.

Letting rationalizations out of the box

We are very happy that someone has finally tried to make sense of rationalization. But we are worried about the representational structure assumed by Cushman, particularly the “boxology” belief-desire model depicting the rational planner, and it seems to us he fails to accommodate many of the interpersonal aspects of representational exchange.

Neurocognitive free will

Free will is an apparent paradox because it requires a historical identity to escape its history in a self-guided fashion. Philosophers have itemized design features necessary for this escape, scaling from action to agency and vice versa. These can be organized into a coherent framework that neurocognitive capacities provide and that form a basis for neurocognitive free will. These capacities include (1) adaptive access to unpredictability, (2) tuning of this unpredictability in the service of hierarchical goal structures, (3) goal-directed deliberation via search over internal cognitive representations, and (4) a role for conscious construction of the self in the generation and choice of alternatives. This frames free will as a process of generative self-construction, by which an iterative search process samples from experience in an adaptively exploratory fashion, allowing the agent to explore itself in the construction of alternative futures. This provides an explanation of how effortful conscious control modulates adaptive access to unpredictability and resolves one of free will's key conceptual problems: how randomness is used in the service of the will. The implications provide a contemporary neurocognitive grounding to compatibilist and libertarian positions on free will, and demonstrate how neurocognitive understanding can contribute to this debate by presenting free will as an interaction between our freedom and our will.

Sour grapes and sweet victories: How actions shape preferences

Classical decision theory postulates that choices proceed from subjective values assigned to the probable outcomes of alternative actions. Some authors have argued that opposite causality should also be envisaged, with choices influencing subsequent values expressed in desirability ratings. The idea is that agents may increase their ratings of items that they have chosen in the first place, which has been typically explained by the need to reduce cognitive dissonance. However, evidence in favor of this reverse causality has been the topic of intense debates that have not reached consensus so far. Here, we take a novel approach using Bayesian techniques to compare models in which choices arise from stable (but noisy) underlying values (one-way causality) versus models in which values are in turn influenced by choices (two-way causality). Moreover, we examined whether in addition to choices, other components of previous actions, such as the effort invested and the eventual action outcome (success or failure), could also impact subsequent values. Finally, we assessed whether the putative changes in values were only expressed in explicit ratings, or whether they would also affect other value-related behaviors such as subsequent choices. Behavioral data were obtained from healthy participants in a rating-choice-rating-choice-rating paradigm, where the choice task involves deciding whether or not to exert a given physical effort to obtain a particular food item. Bayesian selection favored two-way causality models, where changes in value due to previous actions affected subsequent ratings, choices and action outcomes. Altogether, these findings may help explain how values and actions drift when several decisions are made successively, hence highlighting some shortcomings of classical decision theory.

The standard way to explain decisions is the so-called valuation/selection model, which includes 1) a value function that calculates desirability for every possible outcome of alternative actions and 2) a choice function that integrates outcome values and generates selection probability for every action. In this classical view, choices are therefore determined (in a probabilistic sense) by hidden values. However, some authors have argued that causality could also be reversed, meaning that values may in turn be influenced by choices. Yet existing demonstrations of reverse causality have been criticized because pseudo-effects may arise from statistical artifacts. Here, we take a novel computational approach that directly compares models with and without the existence of reverse causality, on the basis of behavioral data obtained from volunteers in a new task. The winning model is a generalization of the reverse causality hypothesis, showing that people tend to like more the items that they previously chose to pursue, and even more if they did obtain these items. These effects were manifest not only in desirability ratings but also in subsequent actions, showing that value changes were more profound than just verbal statements. Altogether, our results invite reconsideration of decision theory, showing that actions are not neutral to the values driving them, hence suggesting that the history of actions should be taken into account.

Sad Facial Expressions Increase Choice Blindness

Previous studies have discovered a fascinating phenomenon known as choice blindness—individuals fail to detect mismatches between the face they choose and the face replaced by the experimenter. Although previous studies have reported a couple of factors that can modulate the magnitude of choice blindness, the potential effect of facial expression on choice blindness has not yet been explored. Using faces with sad and neutral expressions (Experiment 1) and faces with happy and neutral expressions (Experiment 2) in the classic choice blindness paradigm, the present study investigated the effects of facial expressions on choice blindness. The results showed that the detection rate was significantly lower on sad faces than neutral faces, whereas no significant difference was observed between happy faces and neutral faces. The exploratory analysis of verbal reports found that participants who reported less facial features for sad (as compared to neutral) expressions also tended to show a lower detection rate of sad (as compared to neutral) faces. These findings indicated that sad facial expressions increased choice blindness, which might have resulted from inhibition of further processing of the detailed facial features by the less attractive sad expressions (as compared to neutral expressions).

Memory blindness: Altered memory reports lead to distortion in eyewitness memory

Choice blindness refers to the finding that people can often be misled about their own self-reported choices. However, little research has investigated the more long-term effects of choice blindness. We examined whether people would detect alterations to their own memory reports, and whether such alterations could influence participants' memories. Participants viewed slideshows depicting crimes, and then either reported their memories for episodic details of the event (Exp. 1) or identified a suspect from a lineup (Exp. 2). Then we exposed participants to manipulated versions of their memory reports, and later tested their memories a second time. The results indicated that the majority of participants failed to detect the misinformation, and that exposing witnesses to misleading versions of their own memory reports caused their memories to change to be consistent with those reports. These experiments have implications for eyewitness memory.

Choice Blindness and Health-State Choices among Adolescents and Adults

OBJECTIVE

To assess the feasibility and validity of using a discrete choice experiment format to elicit health preferences in adolescents by comparing illogical choices and choice-blindness rates between adults and adolescents; and to explore the relationship between personality traits and health-state choices.

METHODS

A convenience sample of adults and adolescents (12 to 17 y old) were recruited from around Chicago, USA. A personality inventory was administered, followed by pairwise comparisons of 6 health-state scenarios which asked each candidate to select their preferred choice. Health-state descriptions were based on a simplified 3-dimension version of the EQ-5D (mobility, pain, depression, each with 3 levels). For 2 scenarios, the respondent's preferred choice was switched; if the respondent did not notice the switch they were considered "choice blind". Logistic regression evaluated the association of personality, gender, and age with choice blindness and health-state choice.

RESULTS

Ninety-nine respondents were recruited (44% adults). Comparing adolescents to adults, there was no significant difference in the rate of illogical preferences (9% v. 12%) or in preferring dead to the worst health state (56% v. 64%) ( P > 0.05). Choice-blindness rates were significantly higher in adolescents (35%) than adults (9%) ( P < 0.01). The adjusted odds of choice blindness in adolescents was 6.6 (95% CI = 1.8 to 23.8; P = 0.004). Conscientiousness was significantly associated with health-state choice in 3 of the 6 models predicting health-state choice (using P < 0.1 as a threshold).

CONCLUSIONS

The results of this exploratory study suggest it is feasible to conduct choice experiments in adolescents; however, adolescents are significantly more likely to demonstrate choice blindness. Psychological traits may be noteworthy predictors of health-state choices, with conscientiousness independently associated with several health-state choices.

Self-delivered misinformation - Merging the choice blindness and misinformation effect paradigms

Choice blindness is the failure to detect a discrepancy between a choice and its outcome. The misinformation effect occurs when the recollection of an event changes because new, misleading information about the event is received. The purpose of this study was to merge the choice blindness and misinformation effect paradigms, and thus examine whether choice blindness can be created for individuals’ recollections of a witnessed event, and whether this will affect their later recollections of the event. Thus, as a way of delivering misinformation the participants ostensibly became their own source of the misleading information. The participants watched a short film and filled out a questionnaire about events shown in the film. Some of their answers were then manipulated using reattachable stickers, which allowed alteration of their original answers. The participants gave justifications for their manipulated choices, and later their recollection of the original event was tested through another questionnaire. Choice blindness was created for a majority of the participants. A majority of the choice blind participants later changed their reported recollection of the event in line with the manipulations, whereas only a small minority of the participants in the control condition changed their recollection. This study provides new information about the misinformation effect, suggesting that this effect also can occur when misinformation is given immediately following presentation of the original stimuli, and about choice blindness and its effects on the recollections of events. The results suggest that memory blindness can be created when people inadvertently supply themselves with misleading information about an event, causing a change in their recollection.

Cognitive dissonance resolution depends on episodic memory

The notion that past choices affect preferences is one of the most influential concepts of social psychology since its first report in the 50 s, and its theorization within the cognitive dissonance framework. In the free-choice paradigm (FCP) after choosing between two similarly rated items, subjects reevaluate chosen items as more attractive and rejected items as less attractive. However the relations prevailing between episodic memory and choice-induced preference change (CIPC) remain highly debated: is this phenomenon dependent or independent from memory of past choices? We solve this theoretical debate by demonstrating that CIPC occurs exclusively for items which were correctly remembered as chosen or rejected during the choice stage. We used a combination of fMRI and intra-cranial electrophysiological recordings to reveal a modulation of left hippocampus activity, a hub of episodic memory retrieval, immediately before the occurrence of CIPC during item reevaluation. Finally, we show that contrarily to a previous influential report flawed by a statistical artifact, this phenomenon is absent in amnesic patients for forgotten items. These results demonstrate the dependence of cognitive dissonance on conscious episodic memory. This link between current preferences and previous choices suggests a homeostatic function of this regulative process, aiming at preserving subjective coherence.

Covert digital manipulation of vocal emotion alter speakers' emotional states in a congruent direction

Research has shown that people often exert control over their emotions. By modulating expressions, reappraising feelings, and redirecting attention, they can regulate their emotional experience. These findings have contributed to a blurring of the traditional boundaries between cognitive and emotional processes, and it has been suggested that emotional signals are produced in a goal-directed way and monitored for errors like other intentional actions. However, this interesting possibility has never been experimentally tested. To this end, we created a digital audio platform to covertly modify the emotional tone of participants' voices while they talked in the direction of happiness, sadness, or fear. The result showed that the audio transformations were being perceived as natural examples of the intended emotions, but the great majority of the participants, nevertheless, remained unaware that their own voices were being manipulated. This finding indicates that people are not continuously monitoring their own voice to make sure that it meets a predetermined emotional target. Instead, as a consequence of listening to their altered voices, the emotional state of the participants changed in congruence with the emotion portrayed, which was measured by both self-report and skin conductance level. This change is the first evidence, to our knowledge, of peripheral feedback effects on emotional experience in the auditory domain. As such, our result reinforces the wider framework of self-perception theory: that we often use the same inferential strategies to understand ourselves as those that we use to understand others.

The Selective Laziness of Reasoning

Reasoning research suggests that people use more stringent criteria when they evaluate others' arguments than when they produce arguments themselves. To demonstrate this "selective laziness," we used a choice blindness manipulation. In two experiments, participants had to produce a series of arguments in response to reasoning problems, and they were then asked to evaluate other people's arguments about the same problems. Unknown to the participants, in one of the trials, they were presented with their own argument as if it was someone else's. Among those participants who accepted the manipulation and thus thought they were evaluating someone else's argument, more than half (56% and 58%) rejected the arguments that were in fact their own. Moreover, participants were more likely to reject their own arguments for invalid than for valid answers. This demonstrates that people are more critical of other people's arguments than of their own, without being overly critical: They are better able to tell valid from invalid arguments when the arguments are someone else's rather than their own.

Action and valence modulate choice and choice-induced preference change

Choices are not only communicated via explicit actions but also passively through inaction. In this study we investigated how active or passive choice impacts upon the choice process itself as well as a preference change induced by choice. Subjects were tasked to select a preference for unfamiliar photographs by action or inaction, before and after they gave valuation ratings for all photographs. We replicate a finding that valuation increases for chosen items and decreases for unchosen items compared to a control condition in which the choice was made post re-evaluation. Whether choice was expressed actively or passively affected the dynamics of revaluation differently for positive and negatively valenced items. Additionally, the choice itself was biased towards action such that subjects tended to choose a photograph obtained by action more often than a photographed obtained through inaction. These results highlight intrinsic biases consistent with a tight coupling of action and reward and add to an emerging understanding of how the mode of action itself, and not just an associated outcome, modulates the decision making process.

Cognitive dissonance resolution is related to episodic memory

The notion that our past choices affect our future behavior is certainly one of the most influential concepts of social psychology since its first experimental report in the 50 s, and its initial theorization by Festinger within the “cognitive dissonance” framework. Using the free choice paradigm (FCP), it was shown that choosing between two similarly rated items made subjects reevaluate the chosen items as more attractive and the rejected items as less attractive. However, in 2010 a major work by Chen and Risen revealed a severe statistical flaw casting doubt on most previous studies. Izuma and colleagues (2010) supplemented the traditional FCP with original control conditions and concluded that the effect observed could not be solely attributed to this methodological flaw. In the present work we aimed at establishing the existence of genuine choice-induced preference change and characterizing this effect. To do so, we replicated Izuma et al.’ study and added a new important control condition which was absent from the original study. Moreover, we added a memory test in order to measure the possible relation between episodic memory of choices and observed behavioral effects. In two experiments we provide experimental evidence supporting genuine choice-induced preference change obtained with FCP. We also contribute to the understanding of the phenomenon by showing that choice-induced preference change effects are strongly correlated with episodic memory.

Speakers’ Acceptance of Real-Time Speech Exchange Indicates That We Use Auditory Feedback to Specify the Meaning of What We Say

Speech is usually assumed to start with a clearly defined preverbal message, which provides a benchmark for self-monitoring and a robust sense of agency for one’s utterances. However, an alternative hypothesis states that speakers often have no detailed preview of what they are about to say, and that they instead use auditory feedback to infer the meaning of their words. In the experiment reported here, participants performed a Stroop color-naming task while we covertly manipulated their auditory feedback in real time so that they said one thing but heard themselves saying something else. Under ideal timing conditions, two thirds of these semantic exchanges went undetected by the participants, and in 85% of all nondetected exchanges, the inserted words were experienced as self-produced. These findings indicate that the sense of agency for speech has a strong inferential component, and that auditory feedback of one’s own voice acts as a pathway for semantic monitoring, potentially overriding other feedback loops.

Auditory feedback of one's own voice is used for high-level semantic monitoring: the "self-comprehension" hypothesis

What would it be like if we said one thing, and heard ourselves saying something else? Would we notice something was wrong? Or would we believe we said the thing we heard? Is feedback of our own speech only used to detect errors, or does it also help to specify the meaning of what we say? Comparator models of self-monitoring favor the first alternative, and hold that our sense of agency is given by the comparison between intentions and outcomes, while inferential models argue that agency is a more fluent construct, dependent on contextual inferences about the most likely cause of an action. In this paper, we present a theory about the use of feedback during speech. Specifically, we discuss inferential models of speech production that question the standard comparator assumption that the meaning of our utterances is fully specified before articulation. We then argue that auditory feedback provides speakers with a channel for high-level, semantic “self-comprehension”. In support of this we discuss results using a method we recently developed called Real-time Speech Exchange (RSE). In our first study using RSE (Lind et al., in press) participants were fitted with headsets and performed a computerized Stroop task. We surreptitiously recorded words they said, and later in the test we played them back at the exact same time that the participants uttered something else, while blocking the actual feedback of their voice. Thus, participants said one thing, but heard themselves saying something else. The results showed that when timing conditions were ideal, more than two thirds of the manipulations went undetected. Crucially, in a large proportion of the non-detected manipulated trials, the inserted words were experienced as self-produced by the participants. This indicates that our sense of agency for speech has a strong inferential component, and that auditory feedback of our own voice acts as a pathway for semantic monitoring. We believe RSE holds great promise as a tool for investigating the role of auditory feedback during speech, and we suggest a number of future studies to serve this purpose.