That's not the theory of this specific paper, but the says that this researcher considers this paper a "first step" towards this more general theory.
> This theory is falsifiable, because you can ask people their confidence in the original measurements, their confidence in a decision depending on that, and then use Bayes' rule to see if those confidences have propagated.
If your standard is that humans will apply Bayes' theorem correctly, completely intuitively, as more evidence becomes available, I think it will be very easy to falsify that.
Yes. And there is increasing evidence that this is correct. See[1]. If you can find a copy, I think [2] will address many of your concerns about seemingly irrational behavior being supported by statistical reasoning.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_approaches_to_brain_f...
Unfortunately the links to the source article don't work, but from careful reading it appears that the real theory is that the brain tracks confidence in its measurement of data, and uses this confidence when making decisions.
This is a Bayesian approach, and it has been widely speculated that the brain does this.
This theory is falsifiable, because you can ask people their confidence in the original measurements, their confidence in a decision depending on that, and then use Bayes' rule to see if those confidences have propagated.
Quote:
In experiments with human subjects, Kepecs and colleagues therefore tried to control for different factors that can vary from person to person. The aim was to establish what evidence contributed to each decision. In this way they could compare people's reports of confidence with the optimal statistical answer. "If we can quantify the evidence that informs a person's decision, then we can ask how well a statistical algorithm performs on the same evidence"
They go on to describe a video game experiment. I suspect that the description is incomplete, and there is a decision making component to the game that depends on how frequently the person thinks they are hearing the clicks. If that is the case then that answers your question about how to falsify it.