Boundary-updating as a source of history effect on decision uncertainty

Abstract

When sorting a sequence of stimuli into binary classes, current choices are often negatively correlated with recent stimulus history. This phenomenon--dubbed the repulsive bias--can be explained by boundary updating, a process of shifting the class boundary to previous stimuli. This explanation implies that recent stimulus history can also influence "decision uncertainty," the probability of making incorrect decisions, since it depends on the location of the boundary. However, there have been no previous efforts to elucidate the impact of previous stimulus history on decision uncertainty. Here, from the boundary-updating process that accounts for the repulsive bias, we derived a prediction that decision uncertainty increases as current choices become more congruent with previous stimuli. We confirmed this prediction in behavioral, physiological, and neural correlates of decision uncertainty. Our work demonstrates that boundary updating offers a principled account of how previous stimulus history concurrently relates to choice bias and decision uncertainty.