Bayesian statistics defines how new information, given by a likelihood, should be combined with previously acquired information, given by a prior distribution. Many experiments have shown that humans make use of such priors in cognitive, perceptual, and motor tasks, but where do priors come from? As people never experience the same situation twice, they can only construct priors by generalizing...

Abstract: The Exponentiated Gumbel (EG) distribution has been proposed to capture some aspects of the data that the Gumbel distribution fails to specify. In this paper, we estimate the EG's parameters in the Bayesian framework. We consider a 2-level hierarchical structure for prior distribution. As the posterior distributions do not admit a closed form, we do an approximated inference by using ...

To make fast and accurate behavioral choices, we need to integrate noisy sensory input, take prior knowledge into account, and adjust our decision criteria. It was shown previously that in two-alternative-forced-choice tasks, optimal decision making can be formalized in the framework of a sequential probability ratio test and is then equivalent to a diffusion model. However, this analogy hides ...