Virtual: Brain meeting: Max Rollwage

Brain meeting 

Abstract: Contested issues can generate polarised and rigid views. A prominent source of entrenched beliefs is confirmation bias, where evidence against one’s position is selectively disregarded. In a set of studies we explored the mechanisms underlying this altered processing of new information, its relation to broader societal attitudes, and finally we tested an intervention to alleviate this cognitive bias. In a first set of studies, we combined human magnetoencephalography (MEG) with behavioural and neural modelling to identify the drivers of altered post-decision evidence integration. We show that high confidence in an initial decision leads to a striking modulation of post-decision neural processing, such that integration of confirmatory evidence is amplified while disconfirmatory evidence processing is abolished. In a second set of studies, we tested whether cognitive alterations in post-decision evidence integration are related to broader societal attitudes, such as dogmatic and rigid political beliefs. We found that participants with dogmatic beliefs showed a reduced sensitivity for disconfirming post-decision evidence (i.e. a stronger confirmation bias) and a reduced tendency to actively seek out corrective information. In a final study, we tested a metacognitive training procedure as a potential intervention to counteract confirmation bias. This training improved participants’ metacognitive ability and through this boosted their processing of post-decision evidence, both on a behavioural and neural level.