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Indecision and recency-weighted evidence integration in non-clinical and clinical settings

Magdalena del Río et al.

Nature Human Behaviour2026https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02385-1article
AJG 4
Weight
0.50

What the paper says

Biases in information gathering are common in the general population and reach pathological extremes in paralysing indecisiveness, as in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Here we adopt a new perspective on information gathering and demonstrate an information integration bias whereby there is over-weighting of most recent information via evidence strength updates (ΔES). In a crowd-sourced sample (N = 5,237), we find that a reduced ΔES weighting drives indecisiveness along an obsessive-compulsive spectrum. We replicate this attenuated ΔES weighting in a second lab-based study (N = 105) that includes a transdiagnostic obsessive-compulsive spectrum encompassing OCD and generalized anxiety patients. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we trace ΔES signals to a late neural signal peaking at ~920 ms. Critically, highly obsessive-compulsive participants, across diagnoses, show an attenuated neural ΔES signal in mediofrontal areas, while other decision-relevant processes remain intact. Our findings establish biased information weighting as a driver of information gathering, where attenuated ΔES is linked to indecisiveness across an obsessive-compulsive spectrum.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02385-1

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@article{magdalena2026,
  title        = {{Indecision and recency-weighted evidence integration in non-clinical and clinical settings}},
  author       = {Magdalena del Río et al.},
  journal      = {Nature Human Behaviour},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02385-1},
}

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Indecision and recency-weighted evidence integration in non-clinical and clinical settings

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Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.