Humans represent the precision and utility of information acquired across fixations

Alexander C Schütz,Emma E M Stewart,Casimir J H Ludwig

doi:10.1038/s41598-022-06357-7

Alexander C Schütz, Emma E M Stewart + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-06357-7

Copy DOI

Abstract

Our environment contains an abundance of objects which humans interact with daily, gathering visual information using sequences of eye-movements to choose which object is best-suited for a particular task. This process is not trivial, and requires a complex strategy where task affordance defines the search strategy, and the estimated precision of the visual information gathered from each object may be used to track perceptual confidence for object selection. This study addresses the fundamental problem of how such visual information is metacognitively represented and used for subsequent behaviour, and reveals a complex interplay between task affordance, visual information gathering, and metacogntive decision making. People fixate higher-utility objects, and most importantly retain metaknowledge about how much information they have gathered about these objects, which is used to guide perceptual report choices. These findings suggest that such metacognitive knowledge is important in situations where decisions are based on information acquired in a temporal sequence.

Highlights

How participants represent and use any metaknowledge of how much information they have gathered is unknown
Once salience was accounted for, people seemed to fixate the higher-utility objects that would be more appropriate for the perceptual report task, and those that had higher entropy, or contained a higher variability of visual information within the shown view of the object
The strategy of looking at “better” items in this case suggests a more confirmatory approach to choosing fixation targets, where participants’ sampling strategies are biased toward preferred, or more valuable items. Why might this be the case? The first explanation may again relate to the constraints of the paradigm itself: when sampling visual information for a subsequent report choice, the strategy of fixating objects based on the expected utility of the object for the task could outweigh any low-level perceptual consequences such as information gain

Summary

Introduction

How participants represent and use any metaknowledge of how much information they have gathered is unknown. The mixed model contained a fixed effect of fixation (fixated, not fixated), report choice (chosen, not-chosen), and information uptake, with random intercepts by participant, and was fitted to predict perceptual error on every trial.

Results

Conclusion