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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 emotional perspective, as they shape our view of ourselves. In this work we investigate relationships between self evaluation and causal inferences at the trial-by-trial level, and their effect in shaping belief trajectories 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 in this context as beliefs about skill, and their attributions about the causes of the success or failure of real experienced outcomes. 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 at this level. 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.
