Postdictive Illusions of Decision Making/Choices

Josephine Owusu
NEUR 300
Dr. Robert Morrison

           Postdictive Illusions of Decision Making/Choices 

 Everyone has a monotonous daily routine that starts off similar to this: we press the snooze button several times on our clock, pick an outfit from our wardrobe, and grab some breakfast. In each instance, we perceive ourselves as free agents, consciously directing our bodies in meaningful ways. We are convinced that we make conscious choices in our lives. However, recent literature proposed the idea that it may be that the brain simply convinces itself that it made a free choice after the decision is made. This idea was experimented by tricking participants into thinking that they had made a choice before the results of that choice could actually be seen.

Adam Bear and Paul Bloom, psychology investigators from Yale University, explore the inner workings of our mind in order to understand which choices we consciously make, and which choices we are tricked into. Their findings surprisingly reveal that our free will may actually be an illusion. In order to fully understand how we experience choices, Bear and Bloom performed an experiment in which they separated what we consider conscious efforts from how our mind’s influence daily decisions. The participants of the study consisted of 25 college students and residents from New Haven area of Connecticut. The participants were informed that five white circles that would randomly appear on a black background positioned in a 300- x 300- square window centered in the middle of the computer monitor. They were then asked to quickly chose one of those circles in their head and remember that circle. In rapid fire-sequence, after the five circles display on the monitor, one of the circles will turn red. The participants were then given a fraction of a second to look and make a mental note of the circle they predicted to turn red. Participants then recorded by keystroke whether they had chosen correctly by pressing Y on the keyboard. If it was not the circle they remembered choosing, they would press N, indicating no.

Taking the data from the experiment, Bear and Bloom analyzed how likely the participants were to report a correct prediction among these instances in which they thought that they had enough time to make a choice. Unbeknownst to the participant, the circle that turned red was always randomly selected; so statistically, participants should predict the correct circle about 20% of the time (one out of every five times). However, when they only had a fraction of a second to make a prediction, the results showed that participants were more than likely to report that they made the correct prediction of the circle that changed color more than 20% of the time, even exceeding 30% when a circle turned red in the fraction of a second. If participants’ choices were biased, this bias to select the red circle should have been greater for the shortest delays and decline as this delay extended.
 
According to the investigators, the pattern of responding indicates that the participants were not lying about their predictions in order to impress them, rather, they were being fooled by their own minds. The participants subconsciously perceived the color red before they predicted where it would appear; in actuality, they consciously experienced these two events in opposite sequence. The participants were switching around the sequence of events, creating this illusion that they had chosen the right circle, even if they hadn't truly had time to do so. Although the participants thought they made that decision, their brain may have been guiding them without their conscious effort. In other words, the conscious experience of choice may be organized after we perform some action despite the fact that our choices seem like the primary cause of our behavior.

 This paper examines the concept of decision making, or independent action, in light of recent research in neuroscience that was recently presented by Joe Vukov. Joe Vukov, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, presented his research at a neuroscience seminar held at Loyola University Chicago. In his presentation, Vukov discusses the relationship between free will, unconscious actions and behavior. He provided logical and perceptive reasons to support the argument that free will does not exist. These reasons include: unclear and several definitions of free will, faults with empirical data, the complexity of free actions, and the fact that free actions do not require conscious. In addition, he referenced a study by Soon et Al. (2008), Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. This study showed that when participant’s decision entered awareness it had been influenced by unconscious brain activity (prefrontal and parietal cortex) for several seconds - 10 secs (Soon et Al., 2008). Vukov’s presentation, along with Bear and Bloom’s study only further emphasizes the concept that even our most definite beliefs concerning our own decisions, actions, and conscious experience can be absolutely incorrect.

 References 

Soon, C. S., M. Brass, H.-J. Heinze, and J.-D. Haynes. 2008. Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience 11:543-545.

 Bear A. & Bloom P. (2016) A Simple Task Uncovers a Postdictive Illusion of Choice Psychological Science 27/6 914-922.