How minds differ
Ambiguity: not knowing how much to trust
In shortWhen it is hard to judge how far to trust a signal, everyday things like a vague instruction or a joke get hard.
The idea
Every signal comes with a sense of how reliable it is: the brain gives more weight to a voice heard up close than to one heard through a wall. When reliability is hard to judge, situations most people find ordinary (a vague instruction, a joke, a face that could mean two things) stay open for longer. Some people resolve this by asking, checking or holding on to rules; others avoid the situation. Both are ways of reducing ambiguity.
What to try
- Say what you mean literally first, and only then the joke or the hint.
- Say how sure you are: ‘probably’, ‘definitely’, ‘I don’t know yet’.
- Treat repeated questions as a way of checking reliability, and answer the same way each time.
The common mistake
Calling repeated questions attention-seeking, and answering them differently each time.
Want to know more?
Start here
Short, plain pieces by the researchers and good writers.
Books
How the predictive brain shapes what we see, feel and do, with many everyday examples.
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The science behind itHow strong the evidence is, the model, videos and references.
How strong the evidence is
Promising Good studies, but little tested with children at home or school, or the step to daily life is our interpretation.
In predictive processing, prediction errors are weighted by their expected precision (Feldman and Friston, 2010), and attention is the optimisation of that precision. Yu and Dayan (2005) distinguish expected from unexpected uncertainty, linked to acetylcholine and noradrenaline. In active inference, ambiguity is the expected uncertainty about outcomes given states, and policies that resolve it have epistemic value (Parr and Friston, 2017). Atypical precision estimates can go in two directions, described in the next two topics: priors weighted over sensory evidence, or sensory evidence weighted over priors. In assessment it helps to note which kinds of ambiguity (social, verbal, sensory, temporal) lead to checking or avoiding, and whether reducing ambiguity changes the behaviour.
More technical books
The technical textbook on active inference, for those who want the formal model.
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References
- Yu, A. J., & Dayan, P. (2005). Uncertainty, neuromodulation, and attention. Neuron, 46(4), 681–692.
- Feldman, H., & Friston, K. J. (2010). Attention, uncertainty, and free-energy. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 4, 215.
- Parr, T., & Friston, K. J. (2017). Uncertainty, epistemics and active inference. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 14(136), 20170376.
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