Contributed Talk Sessions | Poster Sessions | All Posters | Search Papers

Contributed Talk Session: Thursday, August 14, 10:00 – 11:00 am, Room C1.04
Poster Session C: Friday, August 15, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Proactive Counterfactual Inference in Flexible Decision Making

Peiyue Liu¹, Weiwen Lu, Xiaohong Wan¹; ¹Beijing Normal University

Presenter: Peiyue Liu

In complex, uncertain environments, individuals must flexibly integrate multiple sources of information to adapt to changing task demands. While prior research has primarily focused on confidence formation and rule inference within a single task, less is known about how information across multiple tasks is integrated. Here,we designed an experiment to address this question by asking participants to infer task rules while switching between two tasks. We found that participants were able to maintain cognitive control in the face of task-irrelevant information, ensuring smooth task performance. However, when such irrelevant information could potentially support task rule inference, individuals can flexibly adjust their strategies, leveraging this information to optimize the decision-making process. Participants' beliefs about the current task rule (rule belief) modulated this cognitive flexibility, influencing how they prioritized, processed, and integrated information. Neural data revealed that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) plays a central role in these processes, specifically in: (1) encoding both task-relevant and task-irrelevant evidence; (2) updating rule beliefs and (3) modulating functional connectivity with the human fourth visual area and middle temporal area (hV4/MT). To probe the underlying mechanisms, we trained a recurrent neural network (RNN) model. We showed that within a trial, these neurons operate under an attention bottleneck, which serves as a constraint and mimics the potential attention-splitting process observed in humans. As with human participants, the effect of task-irrelevant information on rule belief updating was observed, but with a stronger effect. Together, these findings reveal a neural process in the human brain, particularly in the dACC, for integrating and updating beliefs about tasks, and how individuals flexibly adjust their strategies based on both relevant and irrelevant information.

Topic Area: Predictive Processing & Cognitive Control

proceeding: Full Text on OpenReview