Adaptive Choice Biases in Mice and Humans

Abstract

The contribution of non-sensory information processing to perceptual decision making is not fully understood. Choice biases have been described for mice and humans and are highly prevalent even if they decrease rewarding outcomes. Choice biases are usually reduced by discriminability because stimulus strength directly enables the adjustments in the decision strategies used by decision-makers. However, choice biases could also derive from functional asymmetries in sensory processing, decision making, or both. Here, we tested how particular experimental contingencies influenced the production of choice biases in mice and humans. Our main goal was to establish the tasks and methods to jointly characterize psychometric performance and innate side-choice behavior in mice and humans. We implemented forced and un-forced visual tasks and found that both species displayed stable levels of side-choice biases, forming continuous distributions from low to high levels of choice stereotypy. Interestingly, stimulus discriminability reduced the side-choice biases in forced-choice, but not in free-choice tasks. Choice biases were stable in appearance and intensity across experimental days and could be employed to identify mice and human participants. Additionally, side- and alternating choices could be reinforced for both mice and humans, implying that choice biases were adaptable to non-visual manipulations. Our results highlight the fact that internal and external elements can influence the production of choice biases. Adaptations of our tasks could become a helpful diagnostic tool to detect aberrant levels of choice variability.