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Abstract:
Knowledge, beliefs and expectations about ourselves are important both from an objective/cognitive perspective, as they inform decisions, and from an subjective/emotional perspective, as they shape our view of ourselves and our capabilities. Here, we use a multi-round task to investigate relationships between self-evaluation and causal inferences at a trial-by-trial level, and the resulting trajectories of beliefs across time. We administered a novel, challenging game of skill to a substantial population of healthy online participants, and collected time series of both their self-evaluations, defined here as beliefs about skill, and their attributions about the causes of the success or failure of the outcomes that they actually experienced. We found reciprocal relationships at the trial-by-trial level, which illustrate the dynamic nature of attributions and their importance in modulating feedback processing and self evaluation. The loopy nature of this relationship can produce complex dynamics, with significant impact on the evolution of beliefs, as we demonstrate in simulation analyses highlighting various functional regimes of an interconnected self-evaluation-attribution making system. This work provides empirical confirmation of the attribution-self representation cycle theory, proposes a framework for developing and testing computational accounts of attribution-belief interactions and provides additional evidence for a need to investigate richer aspects of self-evaluation, beyond local confidence measures.
