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Bounded rationality in structured density estimation: Supplementary material A Experimental details

Neural Information Processing Systems

A.1 Experiment 1 A.1.1 Participants Experiment 1 recruited 21 participants (11 females, aged 18-25). All participants had provided informed consent before the experiment. Cover story Participants were told that they were apprentice magicians in a magical world. In this world, dangerous magic lava rocks were emitted from an unknown number of invisible volcano(es). On each trial, they observed past landing locations of lava rocks in a specific area (on the screen), and their job was to predict the probability density of future landing locations. More specifically, they were asked to draw a probability density by reporting, using click-and-drag mouse gestures, three key properties of the volcano(es), corresponding to the mean, the weight, and the standard deviation of a Gaussian component. They were told that their bonus payment depended on the accuracy of the reported predictive density.


Bounded rationality in structured density estimation Tianyuan T eng

Neural Information Processing Systems

Learning to accurately represent environmental uncertainty is crucial for adaptive and optimal behaviors in various cognitive tasks. However, it remains unclear how the human brain, constrained by finite cognitive resources, internalise the highly structured environmental uncertainty. In this study, we explore how these learned distributions deviate from the ground truth, resulting in observable inconsistency in a novel structured density estimation task. During each trial, human participants were asked to learn and report the latent probability distribution functions underlying sequentially presented independent observations. As the number of observations increased, the reported predictive density became closer to the ground truth. Nevertheless, we observed an intriguing inconsistency in human structure estimation, specifically a large error in the number of reported clusters.