On the Origins of Suboptimality in Human Probabilistic Inference
Figure 3
Subjects' responses as a function of the position of the cue.
Each panel shows the pooled subjects' responses as a function of the position of the cue either for low-noise cues (red dots) or high-noise cues (blue dots). Each column corresponds to a representative prior distribution, shown at the top, for each different group (Gaussian, unimodal and bimodal). In the response plots, dashed lines correspond to the Bayes optimal strategy given the generative model of the task. The continuous lines are a kernel regression estimate of the mean response (see Methods). a. Exemplar Gaussian prior (prior 4 in Figure 2a). b. Exemplar unimodal prior (platykurtic distribution: prior 4 in Figure 2b). c. Exemplar bimodal prior (prior 5 in Figure 2c). Note that in this case the mean response is not necessarily a good description of subjects' behavior, since the marginal distribution of responses for central positions of the cue is bimodal.