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Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 12, 1:30 – 4:30 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

From seeing to seeking: belief-based exploration in gamified environments

Thirza Dado¹, Floris P De Lange², Eva Berlot; ¹Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, ²Radboud University

Presenter: Thirza Dado

Contemporary neuroscientific theories postulate that experience is shaped not only by the world as it is, but also by our beliefs about it. When beliefs conflict with incoming sensory input, this mismatch should ideally trigger belief updating. However, research on confirmation bias shows that we often discount information that contradicts our prior beliefs. Here, we study whether information sampling after belief formation is biased toward confirmation. To this end, we designed a gamified experiment in which participants decide which of two planets contains more (or fewer) stones. After an initial impression that sets their prior belief, participants continue exploring --- first by re-viewing the same visual input, then by actively seeking new evidence. This design allows us to examine how initial beliefs, along with their associated confidence, shape subsequent information gathering across different modes of interaction. This work investigates how we form, update and act on our beliefs, bridging perceptual and action-based exploration.

Topic Area: Predictive Processing & Cognitive Control

Extended Abstract: Full Text PDF